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Design is losing its seat at the table

mokriya.quora.com

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#61

Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is how you think about and solve a problem. I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here: Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but…

>> Good Design Makes a Product Useful

A product will be useful if it is needed, if it is poorly designed, like craiglist. I would say good design makes a product more pleasant and relatable, however, the usability of a product still defines by its core functionality.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#62
post #61

Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is how you think about and solve a problem. I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here: Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but…

>> Good Design Makes a Product Useful A product will be useful if it is needed, if it is poorly designed, like craiglist. I would say good design makes a product more pleasant and relatable, however, the usability of a product still defines by its core functionality.

You simply don't get it. Read the post you replied to again and again and again. "Design is not how something looks". Think about that for a second. Or a week.

If you are not convinced, paste that quote in google and add "Steve Jobs". Yeah, that's right. He said it.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#63
post #21
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironic, coming from a company with such a terrible approach to design. "You're holding it wrong."

Or aluminium plus glass, such a brittle combination just for the sake of aesthetics.

The quote from Jobs gets thrown around pretty heavily, but I also think it is interpreted very narrow sometimes. For me, "(...) how it works" isn't just about functionality, but about "how it works on the user". Yeah, aluminium plus glass may be a brittle combination, but if people like it, it just works. And this isn't on the same level as the "how it looks", because that can be quite different. Facebook Paper for example. It looks good, it "works" well (in functionality and purpose of the app), but it just doesn't work well on the user, because the concept is all wrong.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#64
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is to make a great product that makes money. Its not one or the other. Design by definition sits in the middle of business requirements and user needs. Otherwise its just art.

A great product will make money. Otherwise it wasn't a great product. You can make money without a great product, but you can't have a great product that doesn't make money. Therefore design comes first, business requirements comes second, otherwise your offerings are mediocre to bad. Like my Nexus 5. There's this trend amongst big companies these days, particularly Google and Amazon, to come up with products that do…

>you can't have a great product that doesn't make money.

You're speaking as if the open-source movement never existed.

Separately, this is a troubling view of the world in a moral sense.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but my point is that who designated these as "design leaders"? One good app in the past? Is a bad app sufficient to strip them of the title? What makes Medium or Path design led? Can I just state that my app is design led? >> "It’s now 2014, and I doubt seriously whether I’m alone in feeling a sense of anxiety about how “design” is using its seat at the table." Why? Look at all the other amazing work that othe…

Partly, yes. You can just state that your app is design led. A large part of medium's selling point has been superior 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 deba…

UX designers would be the ones to deal with user experience.

Engineers would be the ones to develop the product's functionality.

What would be the kind of title for someone who "comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty"?

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly, yes. You can just state that your app is design led. A large part of medium's selling point has been superior 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 deba…

UX designers would be the ones to deal with user experience. Engineers would be the ones to develop the product's functionality. What would be the kind of title for someone who "comes in at the end and paints everything to look pretty"?

UI Designer or Visual Designer.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#67

Design should lose its seat at the table if it keeps chasing fads without thinking. 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 m…

You got the refresh / circle only if you scroll when you're already at the top of the page though.

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#68
post #58

"Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works". 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 gener…

> "Design is how it works". Maybe. But engineering and software development is also about "how it works".

Yes, engineering and software development include design. For example the Waterfall process explicitly has a "design phase". That phase is not only about the GUI, but about the internal architecture aka "how it works".

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#69
post #60

Design is not how something looks. It's not pastel colors, and slick animations and cutesy UI. Design is intrinsically tied to function. Design is how you think about and solve a problem. I go back to Dieter Rams' 10 Principles of Good Design often. [0] I've highlighted a few key ones here: Good Design Makes a Product Useful : A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional but…

Reading your comment, I immediately thought of: "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 wi…

Great points – Great book — Great man

Re: Design is losing its seat at the table

#70

Programming has been an important part of the world over the last 40 years, creating value in almost all aspects of life. But is programming losing a seat the table? I will look at 3 apps that were programmed by programmers, and have failed. This should be enough to prove to anyone that programming is on the way out, and the future is bleak for us all. This paragraph contains some more waffle that has nothing to do w…

Surely the programs a good programmer creates should be immediate successes? These are thought leader programmers!
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