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People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

andrewcoyle.com

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Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#11

Post by Animats »

Oh, inevitably for a blog, this is about web site design.

Confidence in manufactured physical objects is more interesting. Discuss.

Raymond Loewy on a good day - The Honeywell Round.[1] The standard little round thermostat. It's still manufactured.[1]

Raymond Loewy on a bad day - the first attempt to make a steam locomotive look streamlined by adding a sheet metal body.[3] This bad idea caught on in the UK, for some reason, resulting in a whole series of difficult to maintain locomotives. Eventually he designed the look of an electric locomotive, the GG-1, which was very successful, looked very good, and had good access to the important working parts.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/meet-product-desig...

[2] https://www.honeywellstore.com/store/products/the-round-non-...

[3] https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#13

Post by fifticon »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5
fifticon wrote: post #2

well, I have a parking timer installed in the windshield of my car, and it has a 'universally hailed' beautiful design. It is an obnoxious hassle to replace the batteries on it, and equally so set the clock on it. So, should I trust thus beautiful design to not be a hassle in daily use..? I long for an ugly parking timer that is easy to use, but those have been driven out of the market by this beauty.

I mean, you bought it…

I did, but the crux is, that this was governed by them driving competitors off the market, so I didnt have options to choose from. You could argue it's the same mechanism, but to me it is important at what point the cut-off hapoens. If I have multiple options, I would pick the more gadgetry one.

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#14

Post by mrtksn »

neepi wrote: post #4

And then that assertion may be shattered when they get to use it… There’s a lot of nice looking crap out there.

As long as it performs the core function people keep trusting it. That's why people bother to deal with all the BS about passwords, captchas, user agreements, crashes, updates, reboots that systems designed by the "best of the best" put people through. Even Apple products no longer "just work".

Don't for get that everything out there is a slop in some way. Apple's core promise since ever was to make computers easy to use and approachable and they improved a lot, enough to charge significant premium over the alternatives.

Computers, software in particular is very low quality across the board. Not just in UX but overall technical implementation is also comically low quality, to the point that contains huge security issues that wouldn't ever pass as acceptable in any pre-computer utilities like microwave ovens or blenders.

Software products most of the time offer no guarantees and it gets very expensive when quality and guarantees are involved through SLA.

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#15

Post by [deleted] »

shermantanktop wrote: post #3

This is the type of twaddle that I have come to expect from “designer” types. Constant boosterism and exhortations to respect their craft. And when left to practice said craft, the majority of the actual work product is visionary PPTs for execs and a pile of figma screens that barely cover the happiest of happy cases. Sad thing is that I very much agree with the importance of design. But practitioners seem often inse…

[deleted]

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#16

Post by ac50hz »

The absurdity of the use of beauty in the descriptions of designs, code and equations is as absurd as telling me, who is certainly not a beauty, that there are clear personal defects and deficits because of that property, or lack of that property.

This can join the absurdity of the websites that proclaim _Made with love_.

Marketing nonsense that has nothing to do with functionality, utility, usability may certainly be useful for marketing, promotion, and leveraging nostalgic pangs, but let’s remember that these are usually vacant, sometimes deceptive and often inaccurate.

The deception of beauty and its insidious insertion into many different fields does little to advance those fields and detracts from accuracy, improvement and inevitability reality.

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#17

Post by krm01 »

Designer–engineer here. After 15 years building products [1] ,from scrappy side projects to multibillion-dollar platforms, I’ve found the most productive way to think about design is as a growth accelerant. The OP reaches a similar insight but keeps it in the realm of product development. That framing is precisely where the friction between engineering and design tends to arise. Design isn’t about making the code look nicer... it’s the bridge between engineering execution and business growth.

Take Dropbox’s much-debated rebrand. Many on HN dismissed it as superficial. What they missed is that Dropbox’s growth had plateaued. The new visual language wasn’t meant to "improve the product" for existing power users. it was engineered to make the product feel approachable to an audience the company had never reached. It worked.

When designers focus on the measurable business impact of their work—and engineers stop treating design as a decorative afterthought—cross-functional frictions fade and growth compounds.

[1] https://fairpixels.pro

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#18

Post by foldr »

shermantanktop wrote: post #3

This is the type of twaddle that I have come to expect from “designer” types. Constant boosterism and exhortations to respect their craft. And when left to practice said craft, the majority of the actual work product is visionary PPTs for execs and a pile of figma screens that barely cover the happiest of happy cases. Sad thing is that I very much agree with the importance of design. But practitioners seem often inse…

My pet peeve with the Figma drivers is that they tend to think of design as a 'phase' that happens before engineering. So as an engineer you are asked to implement a bunch of painstakingly laid out user interfaces that have never actually been used to do any work. IMO it's essentially impossible to design a good interface without feedback obtained from using it. Designers would be way more useful if they'd partner with engineers throughout the development process. But there seems to be huge cultural resistance to this mode of working. In fairness, a lot of business processes make more sense if you assume that having to talk to an engineer is one of the worst possible outcomes.

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#19

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

joduplessis wrote: post #7

The sweet spot is of course having function actually follow form. Very often this is where the whole thing breaks - good design, poor implementation.

My current Git GUI is Atlassian SourceTree[0]. I’ve used it since before it was an Atlassian product (Yeah, yeah, I know that I’ve forfeited my geek cred, for using a GUI for Git, but it makes me a heck of a lot more productive).

It’s not the prettiest app, but works well.

Over the years, I have explored other Git GUI clients (I’m deliberately not calling them out by name), that have sometimes been drastically more attractive, but they have consistently fallen down, when it comes to functionality.

The same goes for my text editor. I’ve been using BBEdit[1] for over 30 years. Again, its interface seems “dated,” compared to many slick apps that have competed with it, but I have always returned to it. I’m pretty sure that it can be customized to present a very modern UI, but I’ve never bothered. The classic presentation has always been fine for me.

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree

[1] https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

Re: People instantly decide whether to trust a product based on design

#20

Post by anonzzzies »

cranium wrote: post #6

That's a problem for products that have been vibe coded to the bone. They may look slick, but behind the scene they can be ugly and fragile.

That is not unique to vibe: I know some platforms from huge companies that have so many bugs that you are lucky if can even use it. Like logging in is a kafkesque loop until it works, sometimes. Support blames the user (browser, cookies, but of course that's never it). These are not vibe coded, have plenty of €€€ and don't care at all. It is always serviced you need, have no or limited competition etc and they get paid no matter anyway. Many many many of those around. Easy to find too: banks, insurers (after the initial sale), airlines (after the initial sale) etc.
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