“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.

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.

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?

HOPE they may, indeed.

Next after that: replace the managers and execs with a million monkeys in a room.

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 ;-)

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.

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.