I’m tired of hearing people saying:
“it’s a technical dashboard, so the UI design should be focused on the functionalities, not so much on how nice it is; we need it useful, not nice”
Why people don’t understand that something technical not necessarily has to be unfriendly or “not that nice“, and furthermore, that something ugly it’s for sure going to be less useful?
But somehow the idea of having a very complex, unintuitive, difficult to understand user graphic interface is linked to the idea of being in front of a very powerful software, extremely technical, meant to be used only by highly qualified people, very “important people”, even if it takes them ages to understand how it works, and even if they have to -unnecessarily- remember steps or ways to do things just because it’s not intuitive.
It’s sad to see how many people using complex dashboards or web administration panels have their desks populated with lot’s of Post-Its, just to remember how to do things in their systems.
But unfortunately, even nowadays, when the UX and UI design has become such an important discipline in the IT sector, there’re still some people who have the -unfair- privilege of being in charge of taking decisions about how some products should be. Regardless the input of professional people in the field.
“Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability – they should go hand in hand.”
Donald Norman
The beauty improves the usability. I’m tired of constantly trying to educate people about these concepts. Especially when they’re your coworkers (of course non-designers coworkers). But this is something with what we, UX/UI designers, as part of a -relatively- new profession, should live with. And I think that explaining and showing what we really do it’s not a waste of time. And especially to show it, working with responsibility, showing the world how much the beauty matters in order to make things more usable, even when nobody is expecting something complex to be nice-looking.
Published:
- Linkedin on 22.10.2015 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-need-useful-nice-gabriela-luc%C3%ADa-lorenz
- Medium on 05.04.2016 https://medium.com/@gabriela.lorenz/we-need-it-useful-not-nice-c10ced94d487#.642w24sfb