I'd also note that despite Jakob Nielsen's prominence nobody designs like he suggests. We should be open to the idea that beauty and delight may be more important than usability or features.
This reminds me of expert systems where use is so intense that discoverability is trumped by speed of input. Old DOS/ASCII based retail systems were often optimized for speed.
I imagine that because of the churn of people doing cashier jobs, there is little incentive for businesses to design pos systems that reward expertise over getting someone up to speed quickly.
Must be a complete and unfortunate coincidence then, that the richest tech company on the frickin planet rose to that prominence through "beauty", at least as their critics still like to call out.
If you’re selling a premium produce, then beauty can be justified by the premium price. But us should never be more important than the functionality. Never.
Even a Rolls Royce is a vehicle (and a damned fine one to boot) before it’s an art piece.
In B2B it's usually ease and speed of operation that's more important
SAP (everything), Workday (HR), Service Now (help desk), Archer (compliance), SailPoint (compliance), and other applications that have been inflicted on my miserable existence over the last 25 years of corporate IT; all B2B enterprise applications that I guarantee did not consider either speed or ease of use to be remotely important.
Your pain only proves my point. You know it is supposed to be better, regardless of how it looks. There are outliers who neglect the end users, usually because they are too big or well connected to be replaced.
I don't know if it actually does, maybe in theory, we would assume these companies would be incentivized to optimize for speed and experience but you can't use "the exception that proves the rule" when the majority would fall into the exception category. There have been countless diatribes about how in B2B the purchaser is not the user, so speed, user experience, and functionality are all at best second order priorities. The apps I name checked above all probably provide the base level required amount of functionality that covers the needs of a lot of large privately held and all publicly held US companies, they are looking for the corp equivalent of Wal-Mart shoppers not Nordstrom shoppers (this dove tails into penny wise/pound foolish quarterly earning mindset, corporate America is dumb AF.)
I wish more businesses would treat beauty as a function of a product just like all other “actual” functions of it, a valid part of the whole package. I know it won’t probably happen anytime soon, because “ROI when???”, just been thinking about it a lot after reading Beauty by Sagmeister and Walsh.
> How much of a premium are you, as a customer, willing to pay for the beauty?
Depends on the category of goods, but if I can afford it then I will probably choose something aesthetically pleasing to me most of the time. I can easily get by with an ugly screwdriver if it works well, but I would not like wearing bad-looking shoes.
Generally if I use something often, be it tools, clothes, guitars, utensils and whatnot, I try to find something appealing to my eye. Some people seemingly don’t care much about that, but it just so happens that I do. Paying a premium for the beauty relieves me from being very irritated about something I might not like.
Also, in my opinion, aesthetics, ergonomics and beauty sometimes all are side products of working hard on one of them. Beauty in tools and architecture and interfaces is not to be discarded since it makes our life more pleasing and tolerable. We could live in the holes in the ground, you know, if pure application of things to their intended purpose was all that mattered to us.
> How much functionality will you give up for the shinies?
I’m not sure something has to be given up at all, that’s the point.
If you've visited factories or other work places dominated by men, many of them go by the philosophy of zero attendance to neatness and cleanliness. Those are miserable places to work and even visit. Everybody working there are usually grumpy and miserable, including the boss.
Working all day in ugly software is like a mini version of this.
I don't think anybody considers beautiful software ad a premium, more that ugly software will not be considered at all because it can't be trusted.
Feel free to tease apart beauty and functionality to a roomful of engineers. I'm always up for the debate because everyone has their own perspective and it's usually interesting.
Everything has terrible ROI if you don't understand the "I" and aren't tracking the "R".
Alternatively, functionally doesn't matter if you miss a sale due to someone not liking the design. The first time someone uses/sees something is the most important time for them to like it.
It depends. For typical software and websites, beauty matters every single time: when you like something more and more and more every time you use it, to the point of increasing usage, recommending it, spending money and so on; and when you hate something so much that functionality is effectively reduced by avoidance, distraction, fatigue, rage quitting etc.
In all of this it's a matter of scale.
Products with 100 million users can amortize the costs over a much larger number of deployments. Even the smallest details become valuable at that point. Conversely, at a certain level of deployment, usability is not worth the time investment. Machine Learning researchers can frequently get away with a loose collection of Python scripts with a basic set of instructions that probably worked on their local setup.
Are they really an outlier, or just the best at what they're trying to do? I mean I guess you could always say that the best is an outlier since only one can be the best.
They're the best at what they aim to do. Again, if everyone did it or they were less unique then it would be less exceptional.
The point is, it's hard and rare to get into such a position. Yes, eventually there will be a new Apple, but not yet. So anyone *today* looking to perform well should probably be more practical.
How long is it since any vendor cared about usability and features? HCI is dead. The only thing that matters now is UX: optimising the software to maximise sales. And you're right. Beauty sells. But this is not an insight. It's been standard practice for years. And as an end user it sucks.
This is the first time I’ve seen someone on HN argue against usability in favor of aesthetics the form vs function design debate.
There is so much to say on the topic, books have been written arguing at length even. I would never argue for worse UX if I had a choice, there should be a baseline “good” visual design, but poor UX can and will sink your product in most metrics that matter in the business world.
> We should be open to the idea that beauty and delight may be more important than usability or features.
Oh, please no. We already have more than enough of that line of thinking. In software, especially, we see far too much pretty stuff that is horrendous to actually use.
I'll take the ugly thing that makes my life easier over the pretty thing that does the opposite every single time.
It was a long time I looked in that book but I hated it. Not because it was ugly, I like ugly. But the advice didn’t make sense. It’s been years sincy I thought of Nielsen, maybe I should give at a peek again.
