Why Products Suck #4: They are Ugly
Part IV in an ongoing series of Why Products Suck (and what we can do about it).
Anyone who has ever spent time (hours, days, weeks, months) creating and (more importantly, refining) a visual or industrial design knows how difficult it can be. It takes practice and training, experience, and taste. A poor font, a button slightly off, the wrong material choice, a garish shade of color can ruin a perfectly fine design.
Many products are made as though design decisions are items to be ordered off a Chinese menu. The CEO will say, “I’ll take that font, that color, and that material.” These arbitrary decisions, made without regard to the effect or the whole, can quickly make a product ugly.
And here’s the real problem: ugly products not only coarsen the world, they are more difficult to use. As Don Norman rightly pointed out, attractive things work better. “We now have evidence that pleasing things work better, are easier to learn, and produce a more harmonious result,” he writes.
Creating beautiful things, especially for products with seemingly utilitarian use, is difficult. It’s easy (read: cheaper, faster) to make something ugly. But don’t we deserve even the most functional objects in our lives be aesthetically-pleasing? Michael Bierut captures this well in his infamous “dog biscuits” essay (reprinted in Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design) in which he defends commercial design: “[The public] deserve[s] at the very least the simple, civic-minded gift of a well-designed dog biscuit package.”
The solution is to not leave the visual or industrial design to developers or manufacturers. No matter how inexpensive or well-intentioned, their job is to focus on building the product with the most efficiency and skill possible, not to create the kind of visual and tactile details that make users love using a product. Give visual and industrial design the time they deserve and not just at the end of the product’s design cycle either. Aesthetic considerations should be part of the discussions from the beginning of the design process: in strategy. This ensures an alignment between the different disciplines, not only in designing the product, but also in manufacturing and marketing it as well.
“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” Thus said the godfather of the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris.
Hear, hear.
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2 Comments
My heart would be with you on this one. Unfortunately, in the fantastic word of technology products, there is not time for the subtle thinking, choosing and crafting that this approach would demand. I don’t think it is even an issue of money, but simply of time to market.
In our school we have students redesign interactive artifacts (Bluetooth watches, Internet radios, location based services…). It is a useful exercise, but the redesigns very rarely get implemented: I am not surprised, because nobody can afford a 6 month redesign cycle in interactive products. The moment the redesigned object manages to hit the market, it is already obsolete and dead and ready for the bargain bin.
Would you buy a perfectly designed, visually attractive, extremely usable etc. etc. MP3 player with 1 Gb of storage?
I suspect that it is easier to make a well-designed dog biscuit box: dog biscuits do not change so much year after year.
The other possibility, and this would be the Apple approach, is to manage to convince everybody that your stuff is very well designed indeed. It does not matter that half the iPhones I see have a cracked screen. It does not matter that mirror-finish surfaces are a fingerprint magnet. It does not matter that to protect it you have to shove it in some ugly, heavy, thickening sleeve. This list could go on and on, and become very boring indeed, and it would be ultimately irrelevant, because no matter how many design points you bring up, Apple has managed to engineer so much desire for the object that it keeps winning.
It would be much more interesting to think of ways of working with the makers of craptastic, shiny, ghetto technology to drag them in the direction of “slightly better” rather than to drag up William Morris and the dead and buried Arts and Crafts movement. Maybe we should be thinking in terms of -what was that again?- industrial design!
Yes!
I think this really ties in with your first article on arbitrary design decisions. The less objectives a product has, the more subjective the design process will be…ultimately resulting in an ugly product.
Form should not follow function. Function should not be limited by form. There should be a symbiotic relationship between the two and if product decisions are made regardless of the impact on aesthetics, the design aesthetics will suffer.
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To the first comment on product cycles & hardware – good design should be independent of hardware constraints. While I agree that you shouldn’t design from scratch with each new product update, certainly a design shouldn’t be tied down to any particular hardware or chipset. A successful design should be able to evolve with the hardware.
Look at what Apple has down with the iPod UI. The spirit of the original 1-bit UI is still the foundation for the 24-bit full color iPhone. It’s evolved over the years to take advantage of color displays (album art) and more powerful processors (cover flow browsing, multi-touch display), but the same design principles from the 1st gen iPod can still be found in the newest iPods today.