Did product design forget the value of beauty?
Is it really just about how it works?
The dawn of usability and function
I remember in the beginning, a website was plain simple. Couple of pages linked together with some text and photos on them. Since the complexity was as easy as clicking through these pages one-by-one, there wasn’t too much to improve on the usability or experience. In fact, these words barely even existed as the buzz words we know them today. We had a tool in our hands however, which was well known for decades: graphic design. How we could differentiate a site from another and improve in general was aesthetics. Classic design principles like readability, colour theories, emotional affect on the user.
Over the past decades the industry and the possibilities improved incredibly. Today we move money, buy groceries, hire a cleaner, organise meetings, book a holiday, a plane ticket, watch movies, deal with official matters, and we do it online on our laptop, TV, phone, watch, and so on.
The design industry had to keep up with the increasingly complex tasks it had been challenged with. How we improve, isn’t solely on visuals anymore, rather on function, interaction and usability. How it works, more then how it looks.
“Looks nice, but it doesn’t work”
I hear this sentence a lot, especially from in-house product designers who not only have to live up to all the complex challenges mentioned above, but also optimising business metrics like conversion and revenue. Running A/B tests and user research to backup even their smallest decisions. Visual aesthetics or look & feel declined to the far end of their conversion driven priority list.
And then they come across a redesign on Dribbble or Béhance, where the maker didn’t have to consider any of the constraints what the original designer had to. Just take a site, or an app, where visual beauty is lacking behind, and make it prettier.
Since the result is usually sacrificing usability or functionality in favour of aesthetics, a savvy product designer will close the browser and forget what she saw: “Kids playing around in their free time, no takeaway here.”
But isn’t there?
Attractive things perform better
The reason why I’m writing about this subject is that I think product designers tend to miss out on an opportunity when they refuse to recognise any kind of value in these designs. After all, the mere fact that someone made a redesign for a product means that there is something to improve upon.
Don Norman is famous for his pioneering work on usability. His book “The design of everyday things” is well known amongst product designers for a good reason. However he wrote another book “Emotion and design: Attractive things work better” which is equally important:
“Advances in our understanding of emotion and affect have implications for the science of design. Affect changes the operating parameters of cognition: positive affect enhances creative, breadth-first thinking whereas negative affect focuses cognition, enhancing depth-first processing and minimising distractions. Positive affect makes people more tolerant of minor difficulties and more flexible and creative in finding solutions. Products designed for more relaxed, pleasant occasions can enhance their usability through pleasant, aesthetic design.”
Aesthetics has a psychological role in usability. It’s a mistake to think beautiful design is a nice-to-have feature only for juniors to play with, while the grown up designers are taking on the important parts.
“Wash and polish your car: doesn’t it drive better?”
— Don Norman
Design is not just how it works, but also how it looks
You might recognise my reversed analogy with Steve Jobs’s famous sentence here. We started to embrace “how it works” so much, that we tend to forget the “how it looks like and feels like” part of the sentence, which is equally important.
In his talk on the Awwwards conference, Khoi Vinh argues that our products not only should work, but they have to be more than that. They have to be good, which involves functionality and aesthetics.
Both of these buildings were built to serve as homes for a large amount of people. Both of them function equally well. But are they equally good?
Penn Station and Grand Central Station in New York. Both of them function just as well. But if you could choose, which one would you prefer to arrive at with your train? (In an interesting study by the New England Complex System Institute, you can see as people are using Twitter - and their phones - significantly more in Penn Station, then in Grand Central Station. Wonder why?)
While there were multiple reasons why Google’s Glass didn’t succeed, arguably aesthetics is one of the biggest. It may be functional, but it “makes you look like a dick on a Segway,” in designer Marc Newson’s words.
“Humans connect to the world through emotion. And design without beauty is void of emotion. We cannot resonate with it. We cannot exist happily in it.”
— Stefan Sagmeister
The value of visual redesigns
If you change something on a product’s usability, or the way how it works, you get measurable data what you can translate to revenue. But how do you measure the value of a redesign, making something look better and up-to-date? Why do product companies update their visual language every now and then?
Once I heard a CEO making a plain simple statement about it, and I think he got the core of it very well: “Look, there’s some value in a redesign. Do you wanna look like a company from the 80’s?”.
“In the quest for enhancement of life, let us not be usability bigots. Yes, products must be usable. But all the many factors of design must be in harmony. […] The products must be affordable, functional, and pleasurable. And above all a pleasure to own, a pleasure to use. After all, attractive things work better.”
— Don Norman
References:
- Interview with Stefan Sagmeister
- Khoi Vinh talk at the Awards Conference
- Don Norman: Emotion and design: Attractive things work better
