Design is losing its seat at the table

Here's my latest pet peeve...

Remember when the Android Gmail client first got the feature where you would drag the inbox or any list view down as if you were trying to scroll past the top of the page, and it would put a little colorful horizontal animation bar at the top of the screen while it checked for new messages, and then the messages would show up there?

This was brilliant. After all, when a list of messages is sorted with the newest on top, if you want to see an even newer message you'll naturally try to look at what's above the topmost message. There's no real difference between scrolling somewhere in the midst of the list and scrolling when you're already at the top: if you drag the list down, you want to see something newer than what is currently displayed.

Then Material Design came along and turned that unobtrusive animated bar at the top into a circle thing that follows you and spins as you drag down and then spins back when you let go. Unlike the animation bar which was displayed exactly where any new messages would appear, the circle jumps up and down saying "Look at me! Look at me!" In fact, the spinning circle obstructs your view of the messages in the list: "Don't look at those messages! I, the spinning circle, am much more important!" A far cry from the previous unobtrusive animated bar.

But even though the visual appearance became annoying, at least the gesture still did the right thing.

Part of what made this gesture work is the fact that it's non-destructive: Checking for new messages has no effect on the messages already in the list on your screen.

But then things went very wrong.

The Chrome team for Android saw this and said, "Wow! Dragging down is the new way to refresh. And it has such a cool animation. We'll make that gesture refresh in Chrome too!"

So try to scroll to the top of a page and you'll get the spinning circle unless you stop just in time. If you're a very fast thinker, you may see the circle and realize you can cancel that pending reload by dragging back up a bit. (Don't let go!)

This is pure stupidity. Reloading a web page is a destructive operation. You may end up with a whole new version of a dynamically generated page. It may blank out the entire page if it can't connect.

This doesn't in any way resemble the nondestructive act of checking for new messages at the top of a Gmail list. It's something you're very likely to do by mistake - I've done it hundreds of times since this change rolled out.

Refreshing a web page should be something you explicitly request, not something that happens to you when you were just trying to scroll to the top of the page and accidentally dragged a little too far.

This chasing of fads is why I am fed up with Design.

Paper sole existence is an original, better interface to Facebook.

Design, as in usability has always been important. The question is, who is able to provide this? Are people who studied design at school good at providing usable designs or pretty designs?

One of the major problems in this debate is that a designers role is sometimes the person who comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty, and sometimes it's a person who designs the entire user experience.

The danger is if too many desginers can only make it look pretty then management might start to rely on engineers ability to design instead of having an actual, dedicated focus on the design.

- The Electrolux Model 30 vacuum, 1937, by Lurelle Guild.[1] This is the iconic vacuum cleaner of the 1930s-1950s. The streamlining dates it. It was a good vacuum cleaner; many survive and parts and bags are available. The computer equivalent is Pac-Man in console form.

- The Honeywell Round thermostat, 1953, by Henry Dreyfuss.[2] Still for sale, and the world's largest selling thermostat. The Nest is a clear derivative of the classic Round.

- The Olivetti Lettera typewriter, 1963, by Marcello Nizzoli. This is a classic in portable typewriters. Olivetti in the 1960s produced some beautiful typewriters, calculators, and computers. They didn't keep up on the electronics side, but their machines looked great. The computer equivalent is the original Macintosh.

Now, all of those were good, working products. There are other design icons that didn't.

- The S1 locomotive, 1938, by Raymond Loewy.[4] This was a case mod for a steam locomotive, apparently based on spaceship designs from Buck Rogers comics. The link shows locomotives with and without the decorative sheet metal. As an add-on, it was a huge maintenance headache, making access to the working parts harder. It ushered in a whole era of "streamlined" steam locomotives, many of which lost their non-functional sheet metal during WWII. The software equivalent might be console video game user interfaces with lots of pretty but marginally functional shiny things.

Loewy did better with the GG-1 electric locomotive. His main contribution was to insist on welded seams rather than rivets, providing a smooth exterior. This worked better on an electric locomotive, where all the important parts are inside, not outside. The software equivalent might be the Windows Aero theme. As it turned out, though, the future of locomotive design was to ignore aesthetics entirely.

- The GP7 locomotive, 1952, by Richard Dilworth and John Markestein.[5] This is a classic for a completely different reason. It's an ugly locomotive. It was designed to be ugly. Dilworth: "I wanted to make a locomotive so ugly in appearance that no railroad would want it on its main line or anywhere near their headquarters. But they would want it out as far as possible in the back country, where it could really do useful work." The GP7 is a long narrow box with walkways on both sides and a bigger box for the cab. Everything important is easily accessible from doors all along those walkways. No need for ladders, no need for lifts, easy access for maintenance. The GP7 looked like no locomotive before it. Every Diesel freight locomotive since looks a lot like a GP7. Like Craigslist, it's brutally functional and works.

[1] http://www.theelectroluxman.com/ [2] http://yourhome.honeywell.com/home/Products/Thermostats/Manu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_32 [4] http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/nov/05/... [5] http://www.american-rails.com/gp7.html

That Steve Jobs quote seems to have propelled a lot of people doing graphics into a broader field; if it is entirely fair and on whose expense I am not sure.

Secondly. Graphical design today is much more a commidity than it used to be.

Libraries such as Twitter Bootstrap puts professional high quality (albeit generic) graphical design into any boring old webapp. And for 90% it is good enough.

Mind you the reason d'etre for most software developed today is a set of specific tasks not aestethics, not branding or marketing. Good aesthetics may be a nice touch to add and I found that it often helps boring internal IT-projects that they look good and conway an immediate sense of quality. Luckily today it is in within the reach of the average programmer.

"Their campaigns find favour in cocktail parties in New York, San Francisco and London but are taken less seriously in Chicago. In the days when I specialized in posh campaigns for the New Yorker, I was the hero of this coterie, but when I graduated to advertising in mass media and wrote a book that extolled the value of research, I became its devil. I comfort myself with the idea that I've sold more merchandise than all of them put together."

"A few years ago, Harry McMahan drew attention to the kind of commercials which were winning the famous Clio awards for creativity: [...] of 81 television classics picked by the Clio festival in the previous year, 36 of the agencies involved had either lost the account or gone out of business."

- Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy