| """This stuff was bizarre to me:
> Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing.
> It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week pushing pixels to create something beautiful
> If there’s one thing you can rely on everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should look."""
""" Really? Because it seems damn logical to me. """The author's conniption would appear to be around graphic design. Graphic design is a subset of design, and covers nothing close to the full scope of what goes into the design of a new product. Design is about how things work and, often, what feelings they evoke in the process. How they look can be a part of that, but it needn't always be.""" Yeah. Only in web design it almost always are. And in the specific "over-designed" startup web services he rants about it always is. We all heard the quote "design is how it works" from Jobs et co. But: 1) In most cases it's 80% graphic design and 20% though of how it works.
2) How it works still means nothing, if WHAT IT DOES does not add value. Customers don't care how "well designed" (graphically AND in "how it works") a service is, if that service does nothing useful for them. Example: a well designed and totally usable "social something" site -- and why would I want to use that if no one of my friends is using it? tl;dr: both how it looks and how it works are secondary to what if offers the customer |
This is a good point; the value proposition is independent of design. And in fact if the value proposition is strong enough than people will fight through terrible design as long as it minimally works. However for most products the value is either middling or else obscured by novelty (often the case with new tech), and this is where bad design can sink a viable product by frustrating too many people, or great design can flip the viral coefficient to positive growth by increasing conversions of casual visitors.