Post Archive
› November 15, 2001
Usable vs. cool, revisited
Flash celebrity yugop shows up on the estimable CHI-WEB mailing list, as an "exercise in frustration". "Assume that the target for this site is people who buy web design services ... Does the site meet the objective of making such a person 'want to buy'?"
The CHI discipline has a consolidating principle that will tend to refine, improve and standardise stuff (widgets/interaction) that already exist, and is less likely to generate new stuff. This is not a bad thing per se, but we should recognise that we need those designers pushing the envelope just like car manufacturers need to keep producing those wacky concept cars, and the fashion industry needs those unwearable catwalk creations. Very little of what yugo's done that I've seen is directly applicable to our day-to-day job of designing usable software, websites, and widgets, but that's missing the point. There is a definite need for imaginative designers like him to keep showing us new ways of interacting with information on screen, which they tend to do better if freed from practical/commercial constraints. (Much of yugo's online portfolio is personal work. I find him quite comparable with John Maeda -- another artistic technologist.) Those ideas may disappear, or take root in the mainstream in some form or another.
What I do object to are designers, with the sole aim of appearing to be cutting-edge, who instantly try to shoe-horn "cool" interaction derived from people like yugo into whatever bog-standard website they're creating, without question its appropriateness -- usually to the detriment of usability. And this happens a lot. And alongside them, certain clients (especially those with internet-savvy X-er market base) who try to get some of the artist/designer's street cred to rub off on their brands by commissioning them for their websites, as I think has happened with yugo too. More of those cases where the brandmeisters win out over the usability folks.
A number of people on CHI-WEB voiced opinions similar to mine. The thread's here.
Nate Posted…
I would have to add that there seems to be a rare third group -> the "innovative usables" if you will. Very often, members of this group lean one way or the other, either towards being more inovative and less real-world applicable, or towards being very usable but not super special and different. This has been linked everywhere (even here before I think), but I believe that revelare fits right there in the innovative usables group. As a side note, I find that on the spectrum of usable-to-innovative the two extreeme ends are both unreadable. Many super "Usable" sites I find unreadable because color is often ignored except for in a few loosely defined rules; while contrast is usually important, hue/chroma interaction can be misjudged to such a degree that blue links on a light yellow background cause me to squint. On the flip side, many design for design sake sites pull the old cryptic typography = artistic stunt. Despite these opinions I wouldn't trade one type of aesthetic to gain more of another, it's the checks and balances that make things interesting.