22 karma · joined November 21, 2009
1. The designer knows many opinions (and due to being exposed to an avalanche of user feedback over the years you really see interfaces in a panopticum). But you never get enough. It's like a drug.
2. The user only knows his opinion. Every user opinion is important--to the designer.
Tufte is just an intelligent eloquent user. His interface design competence is as weak as his photography.
Without working in the field you don't get this perspective on interfaces. Tufte has an intelligent riff, but it's always the same professoral top-down "it-has-to-be-so-and-so", and sometimes he's just plain subjectively irrelevant.
The key is a predefined writing-optimized typography that justifies the absence of formatting (a massive distraction) and a sub-mode that gets rid of all the visual clutter when necessary. Some think that Focus mode is just a gadget. It's not. The noise that is similar to the signal is the most distracting.
Besides Burroughs there are literally hundreds of people that tried it and love it emphatically:
http://twitter.com/#!/iA/favorites
They're not all idiots.
No. Users are people with an opinion. User experience designers are those who deal with all those user opinions and try to find the best compromise. User experience designers are engineers.
http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/can-experience-be-des...
But that's not what the article is about.
But nowadays...
Luckily, I had a chance to prove it many times.
"I don't use facebook but I am sure they did their research, therefore it's perfect as it is."
Seriously? The reason why the search is on the bottom is exactly because I thought that
1. Facebook follows the push (feed/mail) paradigm and not the pull (search) paradigm 2. Search in a feed application is a form of filtering (if user testing shows that people miss it, you can still place it under the logo) 3. I do use facebook but I don't use the search because a) so far it has nnever shown me good results and b) it's not clear to me what kind of results it is supposed to show (my stuff, all of facebook...)