I don’t actually want to be a designer or a usability expert, but I’d like to know more about design and usability. I’m always working on various kinds of Web pages — content pages, listing pages, reports, forms, and so forth. My specialty is server-side programming, but I spend enough time on the output side that I’d like to be better at it.
So where to start? Is Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information the best place to start? What are the other good options? I’m not trying to put anyone out of a job, but I’d like the things I build myself to look less terrible.
I’m going back to packaging up my del.icio.us bookmarks daily and posting them here.
Jack Shedd on why should be no separation between design and engineering:
The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. Yes, in theory, the design team should come up with a perfect solution and the engineering team should be smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and neither should ever have to talk to each other. The resulting product would look exactly as designed and would work perfectly. Keep on trucking you radical dreamer. Here’s a quarter for the jukebox.
The world’s supply of brilliant-the-first-time designers and can-figure-anything-out engineers is not nearly vast enough. While the ranks of folks who think they’re the former is exponentially higher than the folks who think they’re the latter. As an industry where the two sides are so co-dependent on each other, that either group would think of the other’s role as trivial is beyond ridiculous.
This separation can be particularly tragic when the “get client approval” step falls between design and engineering.
In the most absurd case, I’ve worked on projects where one person acts as both designer and engineer, designs without the engineering in mind, and comes to regret the box they’ve put themselves in.
This weekend I rented a car that had a push button starter. The first time I heard about push button starters, I thought they were some kind of gimmick, but after driving a car with one for a few days I figured out which problem they were designed to solve.
Back in the day, you had your car key. (Or if you drove a General Motors car, you had at least two car keys. One for the doors and one for the ignition. How dumb is that?) Eventually, though, pretty much every car came with both a key and a key fob used to turn off the car alarm, unlock the doors, and so forth. The push button starter was created to remove one item from your pocket. Since you can’t get rid of the fob, car makers have started getting rid of the ignition key. As long as you have the fob, you can start the car with a button push.
There are two additional advantages to this system beyond eliminating key chain clutter. The first is that you can put your keys back in your pocket as soon as you’ve unlocked the doors. Being a creature of habit, I never remembered to do so and wound up driving with my keys in the cup holder all weekend, but I’m sure I’d adjust before too long if I owned such a car. The other advantage is that the system makes it nearly impossible to lock your keys in the car. Since there’s no key in the ignition, you won’t leave your keys there, and if you use the key fob to lock the doors, it’s guaranteed you’ll have your keys with you when you’re walking away from the car. That’s a nice benefit for the absent-minded.
It’s always interesting to discover that there’s a reasonable rationale for something you originally regarded as a novelty feature.
FP Passport links to an project by Brazilian artist Icaro Doria in which he uses flags as infographics simply by applying a legend to the colors. The United States flag made me chuckle, but some of the African flags hit me right in the gut, the way few other infographics have. If you’re a designer of any kind, don’t skip this link.
Not long ago I watched the movie Once, which I recommend highly. The main character, a busker in Dublin, plays a guitar that has large holes worn in it. As it turns out, that guitar is the personal instrument of the actor playing the role, musician Glen Hansard. Then I saw Willie Nelson playing on stage before the Super Bowl, and his guitar was in similar condition.
The guitar made me think about aesthetics of this era, where the highest aesthetic value is often associated not with things that are shiny and new, but rather with stuff that looks old, worn, and lovingly cared for. I attribute this completely to the fact that we live in an era when new things are commonly available and cheap. Wal-Mart, Target, and other stores are full of them.
New manufactured goods are cheap, stuff isn’t built to last as long, and a lot of it is going to be obsolete before it wears out anyway. How many people use computers, televisions, or any other electronics until they wear out? Compare a nonstick skillet of today to the cast iron pans of yesteryear. A well-seasoned cast iron pan from 100 years ago is better to use now than the day it was made, whereas it’s recommended that you throw away nonstick pans as soon as the nonstick coating starts coming off.
I believe the turning point in public taste arrived when people started buying new jeans that were already worn out. When I was a kid, all of the brand new jeans in the store were freshly dyed and crisply starched. By the time I graduated from high school, people wore stone washed jeans, acid washed jeans, and every other form of jeans that came pre-aged. We’re still seeing new advances in jean-aging technology. Stores sell new looking jeans for $5. Artfully aged jeans are sold for hundreds of dollars.
What I find interesting is that tastes always seem to evolve to prize the uncommon, or more accurately, whatever is difficult or expensive to create. So in a world where you can get shiny new guitars anywhere, a guitar that looks like the same person has owned it and played it forever is considered beautiful. A century ago when new guitars were hand made and hard to come buy, and everybody used beat up guitars they’d picked up used, the fashion was reversed.
As a parenthetical note, this is what’s likely to be the first in a series of posts about aesthetics that I’m working on.
© rc3.org. Powered by WordPress using the DePo Skinny Theme.