Joyent

The curious tendency of decaying grape leaves to resemble birds, noted on recent morning walks

New UI Preview

We’ve been working very hard to improve the user experience of our core application suite. Here is a preview. November is going to be a month of harvest. Enjoy.

Iconic

I have a huge amount of respect for designers like our very own Bryan Bell who can create a great icon that really communicates well inside a tiny 16–20px area, but let’s be honest, there’s a lot of awful, useless icons out there.

Icons can be wonderful things. The mind can respond really well to visual cues and symbolism, so a really good icon can help you find something in an interface really fast. A color, a shape, relative position or some other characteristic sets this particular icon apart from everything else on the page and when you need it, you can find it without really thinking about it.

A bunch of icons can also brighten up a dull interface, generally take up less room and provide that eye candy that clients and management seem to love. Hooray for the icon!

But an icon can’t solve everything.

New or infrequent users of an interface need to be able to absorb the controls and options fast – they’re not recognising icons, they’re deciphering them, so unless the icon follows a completely obvious or ubiquitous pattern (like a trash can for deleting something, or a plus sign for adding something, or a little house for “home”, or a magnifying glass for searching) you really need words as well.

Call me a minimalist, call me boring and practical, whatever, but sometimes the best way to say something is with a word.

More on the "Non-Design" Movement

Google isn’t the only poster child for the “non-design” movement; other sites frequently mentioned by non-design afficionados are eBay and Craigslist. The idea and basic logic here being, more or less:

These sites feature no fancy graphic design or highly-polished manipulative branding; yet they are both wildly popular and financially successful; ergo, the success of these sites is due, at least in part, to the fact that their graphic design is actually rather crummy.

Cf. this rather widely-linked post from Robert Scoble last month, “The role of anti-marketing design”, wherein he champions Markus Frind, founder of the rather unsavory dating site PlentyOfFish. The hook being that PlentyOfFish is, according to Frind, earning more than $10,000 per day from Google AdSense:

Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Even assuming Frind’s revenue figures are true, the speciousness here about what is “well known” regarding ugly web design is so thick you can choke on it. Sure, there are a few high-flying sites that are at least somewhat ugly, but the existence of a few example cases does not constitute a proof.

How is it not just as likely, if not more so, that sites like Google, eBay, and MySpace have succeeded despite their design, rather than because of it? I can count these ugly-but-spectacularly-successful sites on my fingers, but there are thousands and thousands of ugly web sites languishing in obscurity.

Isn’t the more obvious explanation that the key to all of these sites’ success is that each was the first to market with a good implementation of a good idea?

Is good graphic design required for a web site to succeed? No, of course not. But no one is claiming it is, any more than they’re claiming that you need to have a good domain name, or produce good HTML markup, or generate nice clean URLs for your pages.

I don’t see anyone arguing that Amazon’s success proves that ugly URLs are better than clean ones, or that Technorati’s popularity is proof that slow sites are better than fast ones, but that’s the same “pick one example supporting your case” logic behind these arguments regarding the supposed superiority of inferior graphic design.

A few others countering this notion:

Greg Storey:

I’m tired of this nonsense that suggests a “”non-designed site will be more successful because people are sensitive to using applications that aren’t under the thumb of the man. Or maybe I missed the part of human evolution where people are extremely brand and design conscious in meat-space but when it comes to the Matrix that’s all out the window and suddenly the peeps who drive Scions, wear A&F, and drink Red Bull transform into underground anti-establishment lemmings who flock to only those sites that look like they were designed by color-blind C++ programmers.

OK/Cancel (after sneaking in a nice dig at Jakob Nielsen):

Now, in the peculiar case of these “ugly” websites, a different sort of mechanism is at work. In most cases, the winners of the web these days are sites that are able to draw and sustain vibrant communities and/or solicit interesting user-generated content. Whether it’s Craigslist, or MySpace or IMDB, by being the first in the space they were able to capture the community and the net result was that early success lead to later success.

Andy Rutledge:

The fact that Google’s website is unremarkable and poorly laid out is ancillary to these facts, mostly because the main interface is very simple. Poorly designed “simple” is far easier to swallow than poorly designed “complex.” It works okay in spite of the bad layout and un-design. The fact is Google got it right where so many fail. They built their reputation on substance rather than on style. They’re not important because of their style, but because of execution. They don’t have to look important because they simply are important.

And, my favorite, this quick-hit blurb from Jason Santa Maria:

Good, keep designing shitty looking sites, it makes it that much easier for designers to get work. Simple, “un-designed”, and uncluttered are not synonymous, and it doesn’t ever have to be one or the other.

More on Google’s Graphic Design

The word “design” means so many different things to different people. I should have thought more about this before writing The Non-Design of Google’s Software last week, and emphasized just which aspects of Google’s software “design” I was criticizing.

Most people seemed to get my point, but clearly many missed. To be clear: In no way am I arguing that Google puts no thought at all into their user interfaces. To the contrary, clearly, they put an enormous amount of work into keeping their UIs clear and simple, and this work constitutes “design” in several ways. Simple UIs are much harder to design than complicated ones. (This is why nearly all consumer electronic remote controls suck—it’s easy to design a complicated remote with several dozen poorly-sized and -shaped buttons. It’s hard to design a remote as nice as TiVo’s.)

Design is not merely decoration, but decoration is a part of design. And that’s the part that Google seems to take little to no interest in.

Jonathan Brodsky, in a comment on my original article, pointed out Adrian Shaughnessy’s excellent March 12 post at Design Observer, “Google and Tyranny of Good Design”.

Shaughnessy makes several of the same points as I did regarding Google’s rather glaring institutional disregard for graphic design, and just how out of the ordinary that is for a company of their size and stature. After dissecting Google’s “corny” logo and un-graphic-designed home page, Shaughnessy writes:

And yet, I think there’s something magnificent about Google’s lack of design. There’s something defiant, almost obtuse about its reluctance to indulge in the sort of oleaginous branding and design that is now the corporate norm. We’ve reached a point, in the homogenized West, where good graphic design is everywhere. The battle has been won: every business knows it needs good design – you don’t have to tell them anymore. It’s enshrined in the business schools, established in the corporate HQs. Even small businesses understand that good design is good for business. It’s a universal truth, like “customer service” and “value for money,” and all the other boardroom nostrums that drive modern commerce.

But the consequence of all this feel-good business is that design has become, more often than not, a badge of mediocrity. The old Modernist dream of good design standing for rationality and human values has been flipped. Today, good design is little more than a cosmetic agent, an obscuring agent.

These are insightful observations. And, perhaps, this suspicion that good graphic design is an “obscuring agent” explains why so many people react so vicerally when Google’s design is criticized.

The Non-Design of Google’s Software

Earlier this week, TechCrunch published a bunch of pre-release screenshots of Google’s purported calendar app, code-named CL2. If you didn’t know better – by which I mean having any familiarity with other Google-developed apps such as Gmail and Google’s flagship web search – you’d think these screenshots showed an app in such an early state of gestation that visual designers hadn’t yet been added to the development team.

But, knowing the look-and-feel of Google’s in-house software, we know otherwise. The screenshots of Google’s calendar strongly resemble Gmail and their other software, and regardless how much longer we’ll have to wait before it actually ships (as a public beta, no doubt), this is, I think, almost certainly pretty much what it’s going to look like. Which is to say: dowdy.

Yes, yes: calendaring and web mail are essential components in Joyent’s web platform, and so at least in some measure a calendar app from Google will be something we’ll be competing and judged against, and so as the guy charged with directing and defining the Joyent user experience, I’m rather patently biased with regard to my opinion of Google’s UI. And, further, yes, Gmail is extremely popular and Google is very profitable and their stock is doing very well.

But I’m not saying their design is bad, or even ugly. It’s more like it isn’t really “design” at all. It borders on non-design, and I’m not sure how anyone could argue with this.

I’m not saying they ought to make it fancy, gaudy, or trendy. One of the core tenets of Google’s brand – which brand is undeniably powerful, well-defined, and well-known – is the simplicity, bordering on austerity, of their interfaces. They’re right to focus on that. All things considered, simple is better than complex.

My point is that there is no reason that simple can’t also be beautiful. Simple and beautiful is better than simple and plain. The best examples I can think of are Apple’s iPods: they are both simpler and more beautiful than competing gadgets. The iPod Shuffle, in particular, epitomizes both qualities.

So why do Google’s apps look like this? It certainly isn’t for lack of resources. A small team of a half-dozen or so kick-ass designers is all they’d need. (It’s also worth noting that the software they buy, like Blogger and Measure Map, is usually very nicely designed.)

My only guess is that their executives lack taste. (The sample is small, but evidence to date points to a strong correlation between software monopolies and poor taste in UI design.) If you have no taste – or no faith in your taste – how can you judge whether a design that strives for elegence actually achieves it? In Microsoft’s case, what happens is they fail much more often than not.

Google’s visual design strategy, on the other hand, seems to be not to try at all.