Beautiful charts and graphs. Beautiful stories. Beautiful texting. Beautiful notebooks. Beautiful information.
Plötzlich ist alles nur noch schön, sinniert Dave Feldman im Smashing Magazine. Design konzentriere sich aktuell primär auf Ästhetik, ist flach geworden, setzt grundlos auf parallax scrolling, und auf schöne Links, so der Autor und Designer.
wondering if @form follows @function
fragt Markus Angermeier in seinem bislang 132 mal favorisierten Tweet. Und Dave Feldman blickt zurück auf die Geschichte des UX Designs, seine Geschichte. Die Kurzfassung (10 Min.):
… in the mid-’90s … a button looked like a button looked like a button.
I found support in the work of Edward Tufte, whose books laid out principles and processes for information design … like the “smallest effective difference”. Over and over, he takes a poor design and turns it into an effective one.
Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design an complexity of data.
- Edward R. Tufte in „The Visual Display of Quantitative Information“ (bei amazon; kein Affiliatelink)
- Edward R. Tufte’s „Envisioning Information“ als Gratis-PDF zum Download (Update: Den Link haben wir aus rechtlichen Gründen vorsichtshalber entfernt; wir recherchieren hier weiter).
- TED-Vortrag von David McCandless „The Beauty of Data Visualization„.
Später dann
By the mid-2000s, the industry had caught up with Tufte. Visual design … brought UX to life in pixels.
Why this newfound acceptance of the visual? If, in crafting an app’s look and feel, one can put the user in an emotional state conducive to the task at hand, then the visual design will have been a foundational part of the UX.
By 2011 … We’d taken the “design” out of “user experience design,” and … Design debates were increasingly divorced from user needs
Und
today .. Beauty is wasted when our products don’t address real user needs in a usable manner.
Das Finale:
Great design is a synthesis of art and science, of aesthetics, usability and a deep understanding of user needs and behaviors. To succeed, we need a balance.