The Eternal Quest for Good Design

Posted on May 29, 2007
Filed Under Interesting Stuff |

"The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad in the same way, they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right."

I wanted to find something to disagree with Nielsen on but he is so right…

The one thing I would add is that designing software for users is hard, unbelievably hard. I found this out at my last company, engineers think think only about whether something is easy for them to use and they are more than willing to live with quirky user experiences, while designers think about design more than usability.

When you can get good engineering coupled to good design with an awareness of the actual user group targeted, the effect is powerful but getting them together is a real challenge because everything starts so far apart.

When I wrote about Cambrian House a while back I could have been writing a case study for Nielsen. The user experience features overlapping features, lot’s of community this and that, confusing jargon, and their own made up vocabularly. This is a great example of an outstanding concept that gets in the way of itself with a user interface that doesn’t value speed and simplicity.

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