Interaction Designer | udanium@gmail.com
“We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel.” —Marissa Mayer, VP of search and user experience at Google
“Good design adds value of some kind, gives meaning, and, not incidentally, can be a sheer pleasure to behold; it respects the viewer’s sensibilities and rewards the entrepreneur.” —Paul Rand, legendary American graphic designer, Design Form and Chaos
• An iPhone, Ikea table lamp, and Starbucks coffee cup are xamples of what he author calls beautiful design, which not only feed the “aesthetic onsciousness” of consumers but also invoke loyalty and trust.
Photographs from top by Brandon Shigeta, Francesco Negri, Terry Johnston
Recently, the user experience blogosphere was ablaze in controversy over the value of data-driven methods in making design decisions. Not an entirely new topic, but it came up again with the sudden departure of Google’s first visual design lead, Douglas Bowman. He wrote a brief yet critical summary of his rationale for leaving, citing the paralyzing forces of excessive data-driven decision making, to the point of data “serving as a crutch” for changing shades of colors or widths of borders [ 1]. Alternative views emerged online, with adamant defenders of both sides of the “data versus design” battle—which, as Web-design strategist Luke Wroblewski cautions, is an unfortunate label, since each should ideally inform the other in a productive balance.
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