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“The blue chip product in every category can usually be thought of as being popular despite obvious design flaws. Weird.” via Richard MacManus.
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“Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.).” One commenter suggests it’s because C++ is so commonly taught in college CS courses.
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Does “web services” always mean WS-*? Not to folks at Yahoo. Note: I love this guy’s blog design. So clean.
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Can you do a tableless template for Joomla? I’m going to try, using this tutorial and an Andreas Viklund design.
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This might come in handy some day.
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I’m okay, my kids are okay. See Steven Berlin Johnson.
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About Anne
Anne Truitt Zelenka is a web technologist turned high school math teacher. She is the author of Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working. She writes about family at The Everyday Cafe. Read more about Anne.
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6 Comments
Thanks for the link to the Kids & TV post. Finally, something rational on the subject!
Yeah, Mary, I get tired of hearing all the criticism about TV. We have fairly lenient screentime rules in our household and I don’t think my kids are suffering for it.
The Joel link is worthless. I read his essay, saw him give that talk, and the central idea is bunk. The idea that there is a central design “flaw” in “blue chip” products is junk. In his mind, that the ipod battery is not replaceable is a critical design flaw is his inner nerd talking. Where good design means tradeoff of one thing to another, Joel is also seeking at least in the iPod case, to rewrite history. The iPod become popular based on its design (the tradeoffs and all), and its superior interoperability with the computer (iTunes). The music store tied into the existing success as well.
In the end I don’t think Joel understands good design as much as he thinks he does.
Here is a thing I take a strong objection to:
“Despite having products that are better than the iPod by just about every reasonable metric, they are unable to even come close to Apple iPod’s dominant market share. ”
in reference to the creative Zen mp3 player.
Except that, measuring the products based on megs/$ or some other performance metric belies his mis-understanding of several things:
- good design you cannot measure with metrics.
- elite products are more desirable. Expensive does better than cheap sometimes.
- The standalone product isn’t always what you should pay attention to.
Basically I’m so annoyed with Joel right now. He just _doesn’t get it_.
While his central tenet can be correct: “better does not win the marketplace”, his example with the iPod was badly chosen - the iPod won the marketplace because it was the best. Unfortunately I think this significantly detracts from his arguments - it’s completely lost on me.
Ryan, when I read about that post I was excited at the main idea (that good design doesn’t always win), but I agree that Joel didn’t back it up with a good argument. Perhaps it deserves its own post and discussion.
The iPod intrigues me in that it packages up an entire experience–getting the music from iTunes, listening to it on the iPod–in a way that other MP3 player producers can’t compete with. The battery replaceability issue is tangential, like you say.
The thing apple has always been strong at, which is end-to-end user experience ended up not being a huge win thru the 80s and early-90s of computer eras. I think most of this had to do with the inherent “tinker” of these early computer days (PC computers, you mainframers leave me alone!). Thus an Apple which was not as tinkerable was not as good (although ironically the apple started out as serious hobbist…). But making a seamless end-to-end experience is what is most desirable in the consumer electronics (CE) realm. This is where the iPod shines - especially since it offered a light-in-the-darkness quality when most mp3 players either required you to do some drag-and-drop magic, or required format conversion. The iPod _just worked_. Same with the music store.
Also the pretty sweet industrial design didn’t hurt either.
I think the real problem with “Good design” is that the design may be “good” - ie: wins awards from industry insiders - but this “goodness” doesn’t translate to real user issues. Face it, design awards from the design industry to designers working inside the industry has no bearing on if the product is useful or not.
I think the majority of the “good design didnt win” examples have to do with OSes. And in the end, good design didn’t matter - interoperability mattered. Remember what happened to OS/2 - they solved windows 3.1 compatibility, and boom, out came Windows 95. Plus IBM didn’t know how to market/push OS/2 worth crap. Also 16 MB RAM in 1995 was too much for the average user
ok, I’m done now. I got plenty more where that came from however.