Comments on: Creating Controversy for its own Sake (and How Humility is a Rare Bird Indeed on the Web These Days)

By: Marco Savo

Marco Savo — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 09:37:57 +0000

I salute the kid for making a “what if sketch” and I wish he’d approach Portland Oregon’s wretched public transit site. http://trimet.org/
He could target one site per month and enlist followers to overwhelm the target with requests until the site owners capitulate to a making a new UI. It could be made into a TV show called “Extreme Makover Web Edition”.
Confusing UIs are my pet peeve and there is no excuse for them to occupy the Internet in 2010.

By: Yves

Yves — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:51:57 +0000

I like your view.

To me, the interesting part of this whole story is how American Airlines is handling it, and how it will affect their business.

My complete comment on my blog:
http://www.zlok.net/blog/2009/11/14/branding-is-more-than-a-logo/

By: Brian Kalma

Brian Kalma — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:40:04 +0000

From my perspective the positive thing with all of this is that people are talking about the obstacles that prevent the world from looking at prettier things. That is the area the community should focus on and rally around. I have to applaud Dustin and Andrew for not just speaking their mind, but for having a solution. That is extremely rare!

Andrew wrote about the site I work for, Zappos.com. And as I noted in my response to him (http://blogs.zappos.com/blogs/inside-zappos/2009/09/16/an-open-letter-response-to-youre-killing-me-zappos) I believe he hit on all the right design principles, but did not address the “why” behind his solutions. Design at Zappos is a verb, it is a process to solve a variety of problems. if a company goal (let’s say Apple) is to always have aesthetics be a primary factor then it will be so. For Zappos, we have clearly not gotten there yet. Our focus has been in areas that will eventually enable better experiences, we are laying the framework.

Let’s just remember this: all companies (and their sites) have a target audience and have very specific goals. I like to think that we all design to achieve goals, not to make other designers smile. That would be too idealistic.

Love,
Brian Kalma

By: dalas v

dalas v — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:39:31 +0000

I enjoyed your coverage and commentary here.

By: Jay Fienberg

Jay Fienberg — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:37:07 +0000

One thing to add, that’s maybe worth saying to people who cares about design or user experience, is: if someone produces a mockup to show how “it’d be better if so-and-so did this”: one should always be critical of whether that mockup is a “real design for a real world” or just an idea or sketch / mock-up.

Sketching / mocking-up redesign ideas can be good for lots of things: suggesting alternative approaches, starting a conversation, breaking out of legacy approaches, imagining a better world, etc.

But, it’s also possible to fall into a trap of thinking mockups are obviously going to “work better” because they obviously “look better.”

At some point, one always has to ask the questions: could this company really do this? could this designer really follow through with all the design details? could this designer and this company work together to make it really happen across all the details?

If the answer is “no” to any of those questions, then it’s useful to recognize that the mockup is a fantasy–which is totally fine–but remember it’s fantasy.