Design of Everyday Things / Emotion and Design
This is a bit of a rant more than a measured response.
The balance between aesthetically pleasing and eminently practical design seems to be tilting dangerously towards the former these days. There's no doubt that "attractive things work better", but these days, I'm noticing a trend (generally in web and software design more than anything else) when, for example, I load up a webpage and have to scroll down several full screens worth of overly-animated Squarespace bullsh*t just to find the appropriate information I've been searching for. It's not pleasing, it's frustrating.
That being said, I'm not sure what Norman wants us to take away from his article, Emotion & Design. (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design_at.html)
He makes a good case for pleasing interfaces, and how they significantly improve overall usability, but he also insists that we not sacrifice it for "facade design". Of course, it's ideal to balance the two. But wouldn't you rather have a usable and intuitive but ugly interface rather than a beautiful yet inscrutable one? I remember a time when I could load up a webpage for an organization, or an artist, or a piece of art, and be greeted with an intuitive series of selections which would take me directly to whatever information I was there for. But now, I load up a non-social-network website of some kind, and I'm greeted with large pictures, two sentences of text if I'm lucky, and very little signifiers. I feel like I have to work harder to find the information, and it becomes instantly clear to me that the aesthetics took priority, because "attractive things work better".
But they don't. An attractive thing works better than a non-attractive version of the same thing, no doubt. It can even pick up a bit of the slack of a less-than-perfect one. But a bad interface is unsalvageable past a certain point.
Video games have had this figured out, at least in theory, for awhile now. Vlambeer's GDC talk on "juice" and the book Game Feel: A Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation have both become required reading for aspiring developers, and since games prioritize interaction above all else (although that's beginning to change with story-heavy "walking simulators", but that's another conversation), intuitive and pleasing interfaces are literally the most important thing a video game can have. The development of Super Mario 64 has become almost mythological - it's long been said that Shigeru Miyamoto spent weeks, if not months, simply tweaking Mario's movement in a basic play area, chasing a rabbit, before beginning to design the rest of the game. The priority when designing interfaces should always be on usability, and I think Norman agrees - he just doesn't want us to forget the other part of the equation.
The balance between aesthetically pleasing and eminently practical design seems to be tilting dangerously towards the former these days. There's no doubt that "attractive things work better", but these days, I'm noticing a trend (generally in web and software design more than anything else) when, for example, I load up a webpage and have to scroll down several full screens worth of overly-animated Squarespace bullsh*t just to find the appropriate information I've been searching for. It's not pleasing, it's frustrating.
That being said, I'm not sure what Norman wants us to take away from his article, Emotion & Design. (http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design_at.html)
He makes a good case for pleasing interfaces, and how they significantly improve overall usability, but he also insists that we not sacrifice it for "facade design". Of course, it's ideal to balance the two. But wouldn't you rather have a usable and intuitive but ugly interface rather than a beautiful yet inscrutable one? I remember a time when I could load up a webpage for an organization, or an artist, or a piece of art, and be greeted with an intuitive series of selections which would take me directly to whatever information I was there for. But now, I load up a non-social-network website of some kind, and I'm greeted with large pictures, two sentences of text if I'm lucky, and very little signifiers. I feel like I have to work harder to find the information, and it becomes instantly clear to me that the aesthetics took priority, because "attractive things work better".
But they don't. An attractive thing works better than a non-attractive version of the same thing, no doubt. It can even pick up a bit of the slack of a less-than-perfect one. But a bad interface is unsalvageable past a certain point.
Video games have had this figured out, at least in theory, for awhile now. Vlambeer's GDC talk on "juice" and the book Game Feel: A Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation have both become required reading for aspiring developers, and since games prioritize interaction above all else (although that's beginning to change with story-heavy "walking simulators", but that's another conversation), intuitive and pleasing interfaces are literally the most important thing a video game can have. The development of Super Mario 64 has become almost mythological - it's long been said that Shigeru Miyamoto spent weeks, if not months, simply tweaking Mario's movement in a basic play area, chasing a rabbit, before beginning to design the rest of the game. The priority when designing interfaces should always be on usability, and I think Norman agrees - he just doesn't want us to forget the other part of the equation.
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