Subject:
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Re: What´s new at www.lego.com ?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Mon, 18 Oct 1999 19:52:46 GMT
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Viewed:
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834 times
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In lugnet.general, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> That's what you get for letting creative do your web site design.
> Creative needs to be a resource to the techies that actually make things
> work or you get high sizzle and no steak.
>
> I do this for a living. If anyone happens to disagree, let's take it up
> in .publish
>
> (a good website requires 4 kinds of skills...
>
> cognitive - understand how people think about stuff to make navigation
> easy and intuitive, make the site consistent and match how people want
> to carry out tasks.
> business - to help drive WHY you have a site, help measure whether it is
> effective, and help tie into the rest of the organization.
> technical - to make it work.
> creative - to make it look pretty.
>
> Leave out any, overemphasise any and you have a failure... As a techie,
> I tend to innately undervalue creative but I know there is SOME value to
> it. TLG let creative wag the whole dog.
I do this for a living, too, but I'm on the creative side. I don't disagree
with
your basic theories of interface design, but the way that you present them
makes
me suspect that you have little experience working with a good interface
designer. A designer who creates a site that subordinates function to eye candy
is not a good designer.[1] The most elusive element of good design is restraint
- a clear grasp of when NOT to do things. "Making things look pretty" is
something that many people mistakenly confuse with design. Design is mainly
about communication. It encompasses typographical concepts, color theory,
aesthetics, fashion, psychology, demographics, etc.
I haven't bothered to visit the Lego site, but from the few posts concerning it
which I have read, it seems that the designers did a poor job of structuring
the
information on the site. This reflects poorly on the designers, and
specifically
on their understanding of user behavior, which is a major issue for a designer.
But it certainly doesn't suggest that techies should be developing the
structure
of the site. It just means that poor designers do poor design.
I see my job as a designer as one that encompasses (in your terms) mainly the
creative and cognitive elements. I react to the business element, in that the
purpose and audience of the site has a strong impact on the direction of the
design. I also do technical stuff, unless I'm dealing with large-scale or
database driven sites.
I'm just concerned that your failure to distinguish between designers (in
general) and poor designers is leading you to hold a low opinion of skilled
professionals in my field.
That said, though, there are a hell of a lot of poor designers out there.
[1] The exceptions are sites that don't really have much content to convey, or
sites where the eye candy itself is the content. The most obvious example would
be a site for a design firm; the only important information might be a
portfolio
of work and some contact information, but it would be more important to present
this information in an innovative and visually appealing way than to present it
efficiently.
Josh Spaulding
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: What´s new at www.lego.com ?
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| I won't respond point by point but I will say this, a good designer has to have both creative and cognitive skills. Many bad designers have only creative skills, the way I (and CTP) define them. Understanding things like color theory, psychology, (...) (25 years ago, 18-Oct-99, to lugnet.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: What´s new at www.lego.com ?
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| (...) Yep. Overproduced... underengineered, and definitely undertested. That's what you get for letting creative do your web site design. Creative needs to be a resource to the techies that actually make things work or you get high sizzle and no (...) (25 years ago, 16-Oct-99, to lugnet.general)
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