Does (web) design matter?
Reading about Doug Bowman’s departure from Google, and some of the responses and coverage that has ensued (Kevin Fox, who was a UX designer at Google; Joe Clark, who always has something unique to say; Valleywag), has got a lot of people thinking about something we haven’t questioned for a while: does design matter?
Google’s data driven design approach could be seen as taking design decisions out of the hands of the designer with their wealth of knowledge and talent, and reducing it to something best decided upon by the vast army of users of the site. They don’t see design in the same way that say someone like Philip Starck might see design, ie, as an art form to be evaluated by expert review and design critics. People like me who delight in good design as an end in itself, and who love web design enough to organise conferences and workshops where Australian designers can learn from the very best, can lose sight of the fact that outside the world of web design, very few people care about web design. And no matter how good it gets at its very top end, they probably never will. But that doesn’t have to mean that if you care about design yourself, great web design isn’t something you shouldn’t aspire to.
Afterall, as a wise man once said, “If not everyone appreciates this beauty — if not everyone understands web design — then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see.”
I think website design is mandatory.
The first thing a visitor see is the L&F of a web page, only then they decide if the content is helpful/useful
Money. The only thing that matters. We are freaks. We are following standards, creating open source and freeware applications, trying to make web cleaner, prettier, better, more accessible…, but we know deep down that it is all doesn’t matter.
We are super heroes, who saving the web at night, but during the day we have to work in circus to be able to feed ourselves, to fix our super hero suit. We passion about stuff most people don’t care about. For them Internet is just an e-mail, set of moronic forums and porn.
Does design matter? Yes, as soon as it can increase sales.
Yes web design does matter in my opinion. Branding is key to sales, and with branding a whole assortment of mediums have to be taken into consideration. Web sites and web designs are just one of these mediums. If a company has the right brand and is advertising in to their appropriate key market, then the branding gives that company an identity.
With Dmitry on this one. We are the odd man out, the 10%. we follow these weird standards. Tell ourselves that design does matter that people engage with our design.
Reality is its the information. It’s the money, it’s the business. The design is just the pretty wrapping paper, soon forgotten. Sad but true. If the wrapping doesn’t buy sales, why bother.
Does design matter? Not as much as designers would like to think and a helluva lot more than coders like to think.
We’re human, and the thing we do is always the MOST important.
That said — if the folks at Google are as data-centred as reported, there is some data they are ignoring at their peril.
Usability studies consistently show that things attractively designed SEEM to work better than those designed unattractively — even if, on close inspection, it’s not true.
The problem Google’s facing is their enormous user base. When you get to the point where you have hundreds of millions of users using your products, I’m sure people start getting nervious about taking decisions like those that have to do with design. Doug’s approach would be the one he’d carve out of his years of experience (plus his natural talent), but when presented to other people with dissimilar, but strong opinions, problems arise. Stating your case for having a border 3 pixels wide rather than 4 pixels… sure to wear you out.
Aside for the nerve-wrecking process of making a decision to affect hundreds-of-millions-of-people (and subsequently accepting to be the receiving side of all related hatemail), people are likely to resort to user statistics to ease the process of making a decision. Using numbers, it’s kind of a tie-breaker. Of sorts. Even if it goes against the vision of whoever is leading the product development… and when you’ve got a decade and then some of experience under your belt, I can imagine you feeling frustrated when numbers start dicating the entire process.
James and Gary are right. 99% of all web design is simply branding aimed at generating sales. My kids will choose a yoghurt because of the Dora design on the packaging not because they are thinking about the taste when they get home.
I’ll go so far as to admit that at the last election 1/2 my decision on who to vote for was made because one party had a well designed website.
But (and this is where it all gets confusing when you introduce that completely random factor called audience) if I’m buying parts for my PC all I care about the right part at the right price so I couldn’t give two hoots about what the site looks like. And my wife didn’t like the political party website I did because it’s primary colours were not a colour she liked.
Web design, therefore, matters — so far as making more money than the guy above you in the Google search results.
Oh, and the other 1% of web design is us practising design by creating our own web sites to peddle our wares.
People who think web design starts and finishes with look and feel are not doing themselves any favours. What about designing the site’s accessibility, semantic structure, information architecture and form or task usability? Are you going to leave that to the coders?
Hi Maxine,
This one has woken me from my slumber and put me in rant mode.
What makes the web sooo different from older media types that we should even be asking this question?
Anyway…
From what I can gather Doug’s post was about business practices and workplace fit and very likely trust. Like: just trusting that a (very) good designer can pick the right bloody shade of blue
(heck, I am not sure if most people could differentiate 41 shades of blue… I am not sure I could).
Doug even says:
“I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong.”
What Doug’s post wasn’t about was an excuse to go off on the tired, old ‘coders vs designers’ or ‘ux experts vs designers’ or “stylists vs designers’ debates.
Good designers don’t just SUAC (shut up and colour) they make informed decisions about form and function. This has been done to death, ad nauseam.
Doug’s previous presentations at Web Directions (Way back to Web Standards — doesn’t time fly…) were all about making the web a functional and beautiful thing.
They were passionate and inspiring. They did inspire — I heard it in the conversations as we walked out of the auditorium.
Frankly, I am a bit over the opinions of those who would be quite happy to live in a butt-ugly, boring world. Go beige — see if i care.
Just don’t get in the way of those who strive to make our lives a more pleasant experience.
Maybe this is a topic for WDS09 — web design for the non-designers:
why it is important;
what designers actually do;
and how you can have a proper dialogue with a designer.
Stick it in the business stream ;-)
Next for google: auto-generate web sites (save engineers from having to quantify with data). In this scenario, instead of writing Gmail from scratch, they’d do “a million monkeys in a room” approach and hope that Gmail will crop up.
HOPE they may, indeed.
Next after that: replace the managers and execs with a million monkeys in a room.
What struck me about the story Doug Bowman related was that the engineers wanted to measure the things they could measure and then base their decision on that. Other effects of the design beyond the immediate click-conversion ratios for that particular page weren’t on the table for measurement.
Design often has to take a leadership view, taking into consideration possible effects on the long term, on future products, on other products, and brand perception.
I wonder if, for example, the engineers would happily implement a design that violated Google’s “don’t be evil” mantra simply because “it tested better”?
Would those same engineers also support and argue for all the sleazy SEO black hat tricks, simply because they generate more click-thrus? Or would they take a stand?
I think web design is really important for the success of the business.
Every website should have a very good design whether it will be the appearance or the structure of the website. Design can make or break a website.
Late to the party here, but a couple of quotes from Steve Jobs come to mind
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Love or hate him or Apple, but there’s a reason so many of their products and services are very very successful. I reckon Job’s concept of design is a non trivial part of that.
I used to code almost as fast as people used to “verbalise” specifications. Then (About 1998) I noticed that people were swayed by Brilliant graphics.
In my day job I have to work with awful proprietory software and get paid much less than I use to.
Why am I happy?
Because I am witnessing the evolution of “hardware”, “software” and “liveware”.
“Liveware” consists of creators and users.
Yes design is important but it is often distorting the useflness of systems.