This is part 4 of a conversation with Luke Wroblewski on design lifecycles.

In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2 on Luke’s site. Part 3 can be found here on Bokardo.

Joshua Porter (me)
Luke, you’re right to ask: “Why not have something that functions well and has great usability?”. We should, of course. I’m talking priorities here, and if we had to put one ahead of the other, that’s where I would put them. There is a parallel in furniture making…the Shakers, who build amazing furniture, have their philosophy built around this same idea:

1) If it is not useful or necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to make it. 2) If it is useful and necessary, free yourself from imagining that you need to enhance it by adding what is not an integral part of its usefulness or necessity. 3) If it is both useful and necessary and you can recognize and eliminate what is not essential, then go ahead and make it as beautifully as you can…

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 4

“It is strange to me that in the web design/development world countless hours are spent discussing the wrappers and distribution mechanisms for content but very little time is spent on how to improve the content itself. I think it has become a traditional assumption that crafting good content is best left to the capable hands of our clients or nearly unemployed English majors who didn’t go on to attend law school. Yet, anyone who has ever crafted websites over the years should know better — hell, I should know better — most clients look to their designers and developers for help. From editing to writing the copy from scratch, rare is the project that does not require our involvement with words.”

Shortbus.

This is part 3 of a conversation with Luke Wroblewski on design lifecycles.

In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2 on Luke’s site.

Joshua Porter
First off, I think that Craigslist and MySpace exposing their full content is a design decision…maybe one made without much thought but a design decision nonetheless. If *all* sites simply exposed their content to the world like these two sites, we would probably be better off. So many successful things have come from happy accidents that it doesn’t bother me to think that MySpace might be a happy accident…until you read how relentless they are about updating the site with useful things. Kathy Sierra’s talks more to this…

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 3

Luke’s got part 2 of our conversation on design lifecycles up: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

In case you missed it, here’s part 1: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 2

Earlier this summer I got the chance to interview Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. Luke’s a great writer and longtime web application designer currently working on Yahoo! Social Media. Following the interview we kept up an informal dialog around the idea of a design lifecycle.

Well, we ended up archiving it in Writely, and filling it out a bit. Luke’s got the first part up now. (I’ll be publishing some parts of it during the week).

The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

Continue Reading: The Lifecycle of Design: Part 1

This past week’s Digg controversy is one in a growing number of incidents that suggest that a small group of users are having an undue influence on the promotion of stories. In response, Digg is changing the way that it handles votes by adding complexity to its ranking algorithm. I think that’s the wrong approach, so here’s another idea: change the actual design of the site…that’s the real problem.

The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged?, an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage). The Top 30 includes Digg founder Kevin Rose.

This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon. On April 18 of this year Macgyver at ForeverGeek posted Digg Army, which included screenshots of who dugg two recent articles on the site. Each article had the exact same 16 people digging it in the exact same order. Of the first 19, 18 were the same. Included in that list of people was, again, Kevin Rose. ( for an in-depth history see Tony Hung’s excellent: A Brief History of the Digg Controversy)

These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence…

Continue Reading: Digg’s Design Dilemma

Most books that claim to be about web design aren’t about web design at all. They’re about publishing in HTML and CSS, which by and large has little to do with the problems of the users we’re supposed to be designing for.

I was in a Barnes and Noble this weekend looking at web design books. There were lots of them! I saw old favorites like Eric Meyer’s O’Reilly books and new favorites like Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design. I have a collection of these books, and my life has been made easier by them. I’m grateful for that.

But these aren’t really design books, per se. They’re more like books about web development, a similar and related field but not quite the same. They’re books about how to publish web sites in HTML and CSS. That’s publishing, not design…

Continue Reading: 99% of Web Design Books are Not

Accountability is coming to a web design project near you.

Continue Reading: The Business of Web Design

Professional web design isn’t about self-expression, it’s about effectiveness.

Continue Reading: Self-expression in Web Design

People find things that work well endearing. That’s the secret.

When things work well, we see them in a new light. They become more attractive, more pleasurable, more desirable. Our opinion of them strengthens over time.

Our initial reaction, usually a superficial one based solely on looks, is vaporized upon use. If it doesn’t work well, then no matter how impressive your graphics are, it doesn’t matter. (think about all of the graphic design done for American-made cars). If it does work well, however, then we give it even more value than before, we attribute all sorts of things to it that we wouldn’t otherwise. We think it looks great. That its designers are nice people. That the site owners are credible. Etc. Our opinion of all attributes of a design skyrocket if we are happy using it.

In the graphic design classes I’ve taken they never told us that. It was all about directing the eye, communicating the product’s message, and showing priority. There was never any talk about how people related to the product we were designing the graphic for. Perhaps I’ve only taken bad graphic design classes, but this still seems to be the general feeling…that graphic design exists in a bubble outside of the success of the product and that people will appreciate graphic design as long as it looks good. Most people, however, don’t give a hoot about graphic design unless the thing works well…first.

So, as a graphic designer, make sure that you work on stuff that has the potential to work well! If it does work well your great-looking graphics will get much of the credit. And if your graphics help make it work even better (e.g. if you’re doing interface design), then you deserve the credit. But if you’re working on a project that just can’t work well because of an innate flaw in the product itself then you’re on a sinking ship. Say no to it, and stick to projects on which you can affect the outcome.

This secret is why it’s so important to get people using your software/product/service as fast as you can. If any part of it works, people’s perception of it changes and they’ll tell others. Design becomes social. And others, hearing what they say and knowing deep down we find things that work well endearing, are more likely to take the chance and use it themselves.

And then, after they like using the product, they’ll go back and notice how nice the graphics are.