I disagree, engineering is how it works, design is about interaction between the user and tech-object.
People nowadays tend to put too much emphasis on design vs. engineering, without design you have a bad working tech-object, without engineering you have no tech-object at all.
Don't think that I regard design as non important, I think both have their place in inventing and manufacturing.
Design is way more important than just what things look like. But it contributes to a product's success in ways that are sometimes hard to measure. That's why engineer-driven company don't understand it and engineers (as a sweeping generalization) usually hate it.
I agree with the majority of the article. I think that design is very important and is essential to user experience on your site, however, i dont think design is more important than engineering like the author states.
You can have a functional site with no design, but you cant have no function and just a design. I'm not saying you have to choose between the two here, just saying, engineering is the meat of all websites, without it, you have nothing.
I would disagree with this. Without design of some sort, you don't have an interface at all, and thus no functionality; all you have is inaccessible backend code. Regardless of whether there was intent to design or not, if there's a user interface, there's design.
I think that's actually where a lot of design failures happen: They start with the misconception that something was not a design process and thus didn't need design thinking. By the time design is brought into the picture, there are often underlying inflexibilities and assumptions about use patterns that have real effects on user experience, and the design process is working at too high a level to solve them.
Is design is more important than engineering? Neither good design nor good engineering can succeed without the other.
And what design has to do with that? If your product does not solve a real problem it is not worth to exist with or sans design.
If it does, design is important.
When great design depends on great engineering to work its magic, as you see with Apple products like their touch interfaces or, heck, even their lovely lovely desktop keyboards, then design needs technology, or, put another way, designers need engineers. It's English, don't read more into it than it says :-)
Building a product is composed of two (blurry) stages: creating something that solves a problem, and adapting that solution to suit the person who will be using it.
Arguably, without design, there is no product - by making decisions that are necessary to take something from paper into reality, you are going through a process of design.
Design is most acknowledged in consumer goods, but it is present everywhere. Imagine you are building a widget that forms part of the internal mechanism of a space probe. It will likely only be seen or touched by a few technical people, it probably doesn't need visual appeal, but you must still design it to be feasible to manufacture and convenient to handle during assembly.
You will have to make decisions above and beyond its basic function - does the form fit the assembly worker's perceived model of what it does? Can it be held in human hands safely and without risking damage? Would any damage or incorrect installation be visually evident?
There is a false dichotomy between engineering and design. Modern technology is closing the conceptual gap. Whilst we need a certain degree of specialization, I strongly believe there should be no such thing as a 'pure' engineer or designer. If we want to create usable tools, we all need to know a little of both.
Learning about design in theory and knowing the technical aspects of it can't hurt, but the reason why people create bad designs is not because they don't know how to make a design. It's because they lack creativity. Designing things is a creative process, not a technical one.
Engineers build functional products. If there is implementation risk it's much better to focus on functionality first. A beautiful product that does not supply needed functionality is worse than an ugly one that does.
Design is important, really. However I find it disturbing that such a self-righteous rant has crawled up the rankings in this thread...
Design is an engineering discipline.
Design isn't engineering discipline. It is certainly a discipline and deserves respect but the reason software engineers fail at design so often is that it is different discipline with a different mindset.
Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.
Here I simply disagree. Apple's look pretty because they are designed well. I don't find that they function well in terms of usability - that I have to use the mouse for nearly everything is a usability nightmare. The way they've hidden file system is also a usability nightmare. But enough prettiness and responsiveness, Apple can still feel enjoyable to use without being more useful or even as useful as Linux or Windows.
In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example.
Wow! Holy leaps of logic, here we've got the disingenuous conflation part of the rant. For the sake of argument, the particular way iOS or OSX is designed might indeed be a work of genius but the patents Apple is hurling Samsung are not for that unique approach but rather are a disgusting grab of the right for anything vaguely like iOS or OSX, which would include really badly designed things.
There are a lot of cases where design does not matter. For example, if your software works without a GUI or even no user interface whatsoever.
Now of course you could argue that even a programming language is "designed", but that's clearly a different kind of design. You have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise "design" can pretty much be anything you want.
But we already have engineering experts in the field telling product it's not a good idea. The problem isn't the lack of expertise, it's the lack of ability to push back on a stupid task. The point is, there is no mediation here. If a UI/UX person can tell them what a bad idea is, so should an engineer be able to. Thus, engineering cannot be the slave of product in an effective organization and product that insists on its pixel perfect designs is by definition low quality (because nobody is perfect).
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make. Obviously you have to have a product. But there is no such thing as 'no design.' The opposite of good design isn't 'no design,' it's bad design. The problem with trying to differentiate a product's functionality from its design, is that from a user's perspective, they're the same thing.
>You can have a functional site with no design
That's the thing. You may have all kinds of killer functionality, but if your design gets in the way of my ability to use it, you effectively don't _have_ a functional site.
Design doesn't need engineering. Design can even (in the extreme case) be done to a process that requires no technology at all.
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