[ 1] Douglas Bowman’s Stop Design, http://stop-design.com/, “Goodbye, Google” post, March 20, 2009.

[ 2] Petroski, H. Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design. Ne w York: Knopf, 2003.

November + December 2009

In this piece, instead of rehashing the almost religious tones of this heated debate, I want to focus on the implicit issues burning under the surface and suggest a noble imperative for which designers should strive—in favor of “ soulful experiences”—as a means of advancing the field and elevating our discourse. I do not offer a quick formula or easy recipe. These are “wicked” questions to be examined for each particular design problem and context. By exploring them, we will gain a better understanding of our central task as designers of digital experiences and the cultures within which we operate.

As an eclectic, diversely opinionated community of designers, developers, and business leaders pursuing high-quality digital experiences, certain shared points offer common ground. For instance:

Design is a complex activity • born of a magnanimous vision yet humbled by user research and feedback. Henry Petroski, the engineer-scholar, put it well: “Designing anything involves satisfying constraints, making choices, containing costs, and accepting compromises” [ 2]. There is no perfect design, yet an ideal vision motivates iterative attempts.

Design involves change, • as Nobel Laureate Herb Simon explained in The Sciences of the Artificial, yet change can be quite scary. People may naturally react against change out of fear. Thus, we prefer habituated routines that offer comfort and familiarity.

Management folks—with • their decision-driven attitude of assessing feasible, profitable

alternatives—demand copious data and fear risk and uncertainty. And what can be more uncertain than a messy, iterative design cycle that instigates change! This is simply a fact of their role in driving the success of the business via market growth, revenue goals, and shareholder value. Numerical data provides a desired sense of security, a perceived guarantee of success grounded in “hard” numbers.

Data is fundamental for gathering feedback to evaluate multiple options of seemingly equal value (or wildly divergent paths). Data can provide a benchmark to be tweaked over time with further studies and population samples. Data is great for incremental, marginal “long tail” types of optimization at the micro level of interaction and visual design detail, rigorously applying scientific formulas (i.e., GOMS, Fitts’ Law, eye tracking, etc.). Search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and Web analytics offer tidal waves of undeniable click-traffic data, ripe for extensive analysis and interpretation.

Ah, there’s the rub— interpretation. All data is subject to human interpretation, and humans, as we all know, are imperfect. As Jared Spool once said, “Any piece of data can be whipped to confess to anything” [ 3]. In the end, data is used either to support or repel one’s argument. Indeed, design is an intensely deliberative human activity, grounded in debate— even manipulation—toward some reconciling of viewpoints into an outcome. Maybe it’s consensus, or a compromise, or simply a mandate. Either way,

how data is leveraged is a valid concern for everyone.

Meanwhile, of course, simmering in the back of the designer’s mind is the fact that users don’t always know what they want. The trite saying “The customer is always right” is highly inaccurate, since users often don’t know how to articulate what’s missing or incorrect, or what’s best for the entire service-prod-uct ecosystem. Ordinary people are not trained in aesthetics or balancing trade-offs. Given the choice, most users might just say make it red, bold, and blinking with a loud buzzer sound—the Staples Easy Button!

As John Seely Brown says, “It can be dangerous to just listen to what users say they need” [ 4]. Well of course, users lack the judgment and sensitivities to basic behavioral, cognitive, and aesthetic principles like hierarchy, emphasis, and affordance. So how can they help designers pick a direction? And yet there’s tremendous reliance upon user data to “pick the right design” to assure guaranteed success. It is a sticky mess of contradictions we’re in.

Data is not the final answer, due to subjective interpretation. Users don’t always know what they want, nor can they imagine something they didn’t know was missing (i.e., the Walkman, the iPhone, TiVo, Prius, etc.). Change is an inherent part of designing, but it is scary to some people (especially executives anxious about quarterly results). Let us consider the primary issues underlying the debate.

interactions

What Is Meant by “Data”? The popular assumption is that “data” is limited to usability-lab