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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

>design is one aspect of quality, and spending effort on it is spending effort on quality.

I don't mean to say that making something beautiful is not worth doing, but rather that other things are important too.

>What would it mean to make quality easier for developers, beyond making better tools for design, development, testing, market validation, support, and so forth? All of these tools exist and new tools are consistently released.

That's pretty much what I mean. And sure, they exist, but it's a trade off. If we spend more effort on improving UX tools, we spend less time improving other tools, because there are finite resources. The key is to find the right balance, and the argument can be made that the pendulum is now swinging too far toward superficial design considerations as a result of that being (over-)used by users in choosing between products. But certainly reasonable people can disagree.

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I understand. Generally, we should aim to build tools that address the greatest gaps in quality. You might say that design is currently not the most important gap to address, and that may be, although it hasn't been my experience. Although design has been getting a lot of attention in recent years, the tools for design are still very much in their infancy.

If you contrast the availability of design tools to say, development tools, I'm pretty sure you'll agree there's a huge gap there. I grant that there has been a recent surge in UX/sketching tools, but so many areas of design are still left untouched. Recently, for example, I was very excited by discovering http://macrabbit.com/slicy/ and http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope - both solve problems many designers have, and they both make my designer life so much easier.

Perhaps to return to your original point - the world is full of people who follow trends blindly. I run an app development company, and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me to build an app that no one needs, well, you know the end of that saying. Still, if you're going to follow trends without good thinking, 'invest in design' is by far not the worst you could follow.

I think it turns on the distinction a lot of people have been pointing out between design as the superficial appearance of the app in the first fifteen minutes of use, and design as something that goes deep into the stack and brings everything together into something beautiful.

What you're talking about is more like the second kind, and I agree that the tools to do that are sorely lacking.

The problem as I see it is that the world has been building tools that allow a college freshman to build a superficially professional-looking app in a month (which often turns out to be unusable crap upon close inspection), rather than tools that allow a team of seasoned professionals to build something awe-inspiring in six months instead of two years. Because the current market allows you to get your dollar from millions of suckers selling the superficially pretty junk before they realize what they paid for.

To extend the development tools analogy, it's the UX equivalent of having loosed Visual Basic onto the world and thousands of noobs are happily churning out Visual Basic software, when what we really need is the C family and its toolchain. So the hope is that the incentives can be to produce that rather than just iterating onto the next version of UX VB.

Perhaps you're right, but I haven't come across much superficially pretty junk. Any high profile examples come to mind?

Most of Zynga's products come to mind. Mindless crap designed to be attractive and psychologically addictive without teaching the user anything or providing any intellectual stimulation.

I wouldn't expect many high profile examples though. By its nature junk tends to have a short shelf-life, last years junk just gets replaced with this year's junk.

I'm still not sure there's a real pattern here, beyond the always present 'make a quick buck' style of business, which has probably been around since business was discovered. Good discussion though. Thanks. You on twitter?

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