A longtime critic of design, Don Norman has lately been applauding the emotional value of beautiful design, even declaring “attractive products work better.” In Emotional Design Norman cites a study involving ATM machines with various layouts, which revealed that the pleasing layouts performed better, whether in Japan or in Israel. The cognitive faculties are influenced by the affective or emotional aspects. So when in a positive, relaxed mood, the user is more likely to work out difficulties if they arise, rather than anxiously panicking and getting frustrated, worsening the usability. And let’s not forget the negative impressions from an unattractive design, which affect trust, confidence, and loyalty. Social commentator Virgina Postrel has noted the rise of aesthetic consciousness among customers with the increased purchases of Starbucks coffee, Target housewares, and IKEA furniture. In fact, consumers now more than ever make purchasing decisions based upon a sense of style as an indicator of trustworthy product quality. Just ask your product manager why he drives a BMW M5 instead of a Pontiac.
Designers, of course, have long known this. But amid feature creep, “death march” schedules, and data-driven methods, the designer’s voice of hope is being drowned out, sadly to the detriment of consumers. How do extensive numerical data studies enable the aesthetic character, the humanizing quality, the elusive wonderment that makes a design resonate with one’s dreams and desires, thus
Data in all its forms is valuable and ultimately informs a design vision. But in the drive for timeless, emotionally resonant products that speak to human aspirations and values, designers must champion their vision and serve their moral duty, to go beyond what the data says and strive for a culturally expressive balance—what is fair, just, and good. To do otherwise only reduces the value of design, damaging public understanding of good design and weakening design’s overall position in society.
Designers have imagination, empathy, and intuition, which are just as legitimate as statistical data and are grounded in knowledge and principles. Design is an argumentative process, and as the design must be argued for, so too must the data. Neither is the final answer or the truth; instead there’s a process of discovery and understanding.
breathing life into the efficiently mundane?
There is a need for aesthetic character, a defining quality that lends tone and personality amid the numbing grayness of marginally optimized functionalism. Otherwise, the resulting product will be imbalanced, an incomplete argument lacking the range of sensory and affective appeals to a customer’s sense of emotion, beauty, and desire beyond raw utility. Such a product can be functional and usable but undeserving of the emotional connection that leads to repeat use and shared testimonial—and thus, utterly soulless. Quite simply, it is a bore.
Instead, let us strive for vivid, rewarding encounters that make digital experience worthy—something that fulfills our goals, values, and attitudes for living. As ex–Apple design leader Robert Brunner says, “We must go beyond usability to create a product people will desire.” [ 7] This is a necessary moral duty for designers; failure to strive for this is a mark of cowardice and weakness. It takes a genuinely inspired and talented human being to elicit such qualities in pixels and matter, through a complex mix of culture, language, and style. There is an ineffable quality that transcends mere numbers, suggesting a poetic elegance—a kind of equipoise. Hundreds of numerical studies will not provide this, no matter how rigorous or detailed. It takes the judgment, inspiration, experience, and talent of a good designer to resolve a cohesive blend of the rational and the imaginative into something that people will enjoy using.
[ 7] Brunner, R. Do You Matter? How Great Design Will Make People Love Your Company. Upper Saddle River, NJ: F T Press, 2008.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Uday Gajendar is a prolific
interaction designer. His
work has spanned enter-
prise software, creative
tools, Web and mobile
apps, and VOIP devices at Oracle, Adobe,
Cisco, and other Silicon Valley firms. A
graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s IxD Program,
Gajendar advances the design field with
discussions about beauty, leadership, and
strategy, for venues like IDSA, IA Summit,
and Silicon Valley Codecamp. He has also
taught interaction design at San José State
in California. For further musings on design,
visit his blog at www.ghostinthepixel.com.
November + December 2009
DOI: 10.1145/1620693.1620702
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/1100 $10.00
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