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It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

blog.webflow.com

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Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#41

Post by mgkimsal »

palakchokshi wrote: post #36

"The design of a solution is much more important than its implementation under the covers, since the latter is almost always invisible to the user and can take on so many different permutations. Whether it’s a simple web page, a data-rich online newspaper, or a full-blown interactive application - how users experience it easily trumps the underlying code used to build it." did you just say that how an application LOO…

In some respects, it is more important, and I say this as someone who is more of a server-side guy. Regardless of how scalable your data system is, and how secure your code is, if the front-end that people use looks like crap, they will not use it, and they'll use some other garbage system that exposes their data and crashes regularly, but it feels nice.

Looking good is important at the start of the experience, otherwise there won't be a long term relationship to demonstrate the awesomeness of the rest of the system.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#42

Post by Joeboy »

There seems to be an underlying assumption that every website needs a designer. One of the great things about the web is (or used to be) that anybody can publish on it. I hope there will eventually be a backlash to the "conspicuous design everywhere" trend.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#43

Post by ixmatus »

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding from people that do not know how to program "in the large". Real programming is actually heavily reliant on human creativity and synthesis. Just like good visual design.

Programmers are always automating and we are succeeding at it. Many tasks and roles have been eliminated in the last ten years by better tools and services.

Designers don't really do that, they get better tools to better represent their vision from...programmers.

I think design and art is crucial and the people that do it well are critical. But not as critical as the people that support the entire ecosystem.

If I were to say who would rule anything, it would be mathematicians, in every domain of knowledge - even design - mathematics is the ultimate intellectual tool to express abstraction, cardinal to the act of automating and reducing.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#44

Post by callmevlad »

jarrett wrote: post #23
callmevlad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pessimism aside, isn't that exactly what happened with desktop publishing software? The work of manual typesetters, etc was automated, and print designers became a lot more relevant.

Historically, some tasks have proven easier to automate than others. Much of typesetting and printing was rote, thus it was automated fairly early in the history of computers. There have been efforts to automate programming, but so far it has proven impossible. That's because programming is almost never rote. It's likely that automating programming is tantamount to inventing a true artificial intelligence. If that ha…

You're right, but I'm not arguing that programming can be automated as a whole. I'm saying that most rote tasks in web development (writing HTML/CSS, linking together various libraries, pushing code through processors, wiring up a basic UI to a database, etc) can be.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#45

Post by visakanv »

Joeboy wrote: post #42

There seems to be an underlying assumption that every website needs a designer. One of the great things about the web is (or used to be) that anybody can publish on it. I hope there will eventually be a backlash to the "conspicuous design everywhere" trend.

I think designers will rule the "visual web", which will be a huge part of the "popular web", but there will always be a market for quality. I would happily read unformatted .txt files online if it's written by somebody I admire.

See also: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#46

Post by jmzbond »

I think in the Valley there's an over-emphasis on design, sometimes one that comes at the expense of utility.

If we look at the most popular places in the Web, like Craigslist or Wikipedia (or day I say YC), none of them are particularly beautiful. And they could be made more beautiful today sure, but they started with something highly utilitarian.

At many start-up events, I've seen ideas that didn't really solve problems and weren't that utilitarian, but were so BEAUTIFUL that people assumed they were great. I worry about this, because then the founders get a lot of "false positive" responses, and when they actually enter the marketplace, they might find that reality expectation. Bad for them, but also bad for everyone else, because what's the cost of this huge emphasis on design as opposed to true utility?

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#48

Post by palakchokshi »

mgkimsal wrote: post #41
palakchokshi wrote: post #36

"The design of a solution is much more important than its implementation under the covers, since the latter is almost always invisible to the user and can take on so many different permutations. Whether it’s a simple web page, a data-rich online newspaper, or a full-blown interactive application - how users experience it easily trumps the underlying code used to build it." did you just say that how an application LOO…

In some respects, it is more important, and I say this as someone who is more of a server-side guy. Regardless of how scalable your data system is, and how secure your code is, if the front-end that people use looks like crap, they will not use it, and they'll use some other garbage system that exposes their data and crashes regularly, but it feels nice. Looking good is important at the start of the experience, other…

He said "much more important". Sorry but that's just not true. Secondly I present to you http://sfbay.craigslist.org https://news.ycombinator.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#49

Post by mgkimsal »

palakchokshi wrote: post #48
mgkimsal wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some respects, it is more important, and I say this as someone who is more of a server-side guy. Regardless of how scalable your data system is, and how secure your code is, if the front-end that people use looks like crap, they will not use it, and they'll use some other garbage system that exposes their data and crashes regularly, but it feels nice. Looking good is important at the start of the experience, other…

He said "much more important". Sorry but that's just not true. Secondly I present to you http://sfbay.craigslist.org https://news.ycombinator.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

those are outliers, and have a network effect ('moat'?) around them that ensures the game is theirs to lose. CL and Wikipedia started over a decade ago - anyone trying to get any sort of mindshare in those markets would not succeed without something that had a design (visual and ux flow) that was appealing to the users. In rare instances that might be barebones plaintext, but in most cases it won't be.

Re: It's Inevitable: Designers Will Rule the Web

#50

Post by jarrett »

callmevlad wrote: post #39
jarrett wrote: post #19

I don't believe there is a major leap to be made. Here's why. There have always been visual editors for the web. As the author suggests, they have relied on abstractions of the underlying code. For example, the CSS box model (width/height, padding, border, margin) are often abstracted as draggable handles on bounding boxes. Yet these systems suffer from some fundamental limitations: 1. They obscure the underlying imp…

1. I think a good abstraction should make it clear what the underlying implementation is doing, and Webflow gives you access to the generated code if you need it. Sounds like a leaky abstraction, but aren't they all? ;) 2. Yes, they do now, but they won't always. For example, we're already working on an intuitive implementation of nested selectors. But I agree with you, things like pseudo-elements, complex selectors,…

> Webflow gives you access to the generated code if you need it.

So you're assuming that the designer will have to do some hand-coding after all, yes? I agree that it will almost always be necessary. So, how do you ensure that the generated code is pleasant to work with, and not a mess? Historically, that's always been a huge problem in this genre of software.

> For example, we're already working on an intuitive implementation of nested selectors...move to the UI

It sounds like you intend to build a graphical representation of the concepts that code has traditionally expressed. As I briefly touched on, that ambition has a troubled history. Many attempts[1] have been made, but none has replaced text-based programming in the mainstream. The basic problem is this: Code represented graphically is still code, it still carries with it all the cognitive challenges of code, and now it's in a clunkier format than text.

> the entire Webflow blog - including the JS interactions, working forms, etc - was built by my brother Sergie, a designer who doesn't code.

Naturally, you can author static content (with limited styling logic) in a visual environment. There have been plenty of apps for that dating back to the early days. Dreamweaver comes to mind. I don't dispute that much. My point is that I don't see room for a dramatic advance beyond the status quo of that genre. And that there are known limitations to the status quo.

The only form I see is an email list signup, which points to an external service. Again, that's always been easy with visual editors. It's also easy in code. E.g.:

  
    Your email:
For someone who has the brains to learn a complex graphical editing tool, the above should not be difficult to learn.

For this example--an email signup form--the backend is where everything interesting happens. The backend for an email signup form such as the one above could easily be tens of thousands of lines of code. Or more. So I don't think it's fair to say that a non-coder "built" that email signup form.

> And I think you'd be surprised by what you can do with content pulled from a database in a UI.

I'm familiar with apps that do that, and I think I know their upper limits. Applications like MS Access have been doing that for years. Those kinds of abstractions have always existed and always will. The problem is that they're limited. Assumptions about the user experience and business logic are baked into the abstractions. Do you foresee a breakthrough on that front?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language

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