Design Matters Part 1

The quote “Form follows function” has been widely mis-represented in meaning that function is the most important thing and that form is less important and can easily be left out. The actual quote, from Louis Sullivan, “Form ever follow function” means that form is built on top of function and that form is the expression of functionality:

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.”

It is my belief that “Form is the Function” in so much as the form is what makes the function successful. Often times the form is defined by the function. Now, I’m sure most non-designer would initially disagree with me, but let’s look at a few examples.

Membership Shopping Site

The sites below, Shop It To Me and Gilt, are both discount shopping sites that require membership. They are virtually identical until you look at their design, or form. Both function similarly in that members are sent an email (seen below) to show that day’s specials and incite you to buy now. Both feed their members products based on their profile and choices. The difference is in the form. Gilt has a much more high-end look and feel and, for the most part, shows a single sample of the product being used, essentially a lifestyle shot. Shop It To Me went with body-less clothes on a plain background. Their logo, the illustration of the lazy man on the couch, the quantity over quality aspect of product shots all cheapen their brand and make it a far less enticing place to shop from.

How does this impact success? While there are likely multiple factors that impact site visits, and I have no information on their sales, Gilt has more than twice the unique visitor traffic per month of Shop It To Me, despite the poor economy and the fact that Gilt seems to be appealing to a more elite audience and Shop It To Me is appealing to the more spend-thrifty audience:

Both sites have similar products, similar functionality, the obvious difference is their form.

This is not atypical of web platforms: the better the design, the more successful the company. It’s been argued that the better designed sites are because of their success not the reverse. The easy response to this is: If a company is already successful without taking the extra time and budget for a design upgrade, why spend the money? How often have you visited an ugly site and preferred a more elegantly designed competitor? This is because quality of design not only makes the site look more professional and trustworthy, it actually functions better because of that design.

A design agency I recently worked for focused 90% of it’s business on analyzing how design impacts conversion. Things as minor as the color of the CTA (call to action) had a significant impact on the number of conversions. More obvious aspects such as email, banner ad and landing pages that reflected each other’s messaging and design had a huge impact on conversions. The testing process would begin with a few different wireframes with similar design elements. The champion wireframe would then be retested with different design elements, over and over to find the most successful outcome. If the function of the site was to convert visitors to customers, the form was the differentiator.

While I completely agree that a site that functions better is more successful, the fact that functionality is so plug and play makes functionality a level playing field. The great differentiator is the form.

 

Update: The following article discusses a study proving that elegant design effects user trust. A good read:

Prettier Websites Make For More Trusting Web Surfers Study Finds

Apple’s Big Mistake (and the solution)

Apple’s recent release of the iPhone 4 saw the Cupertino company make a blunder usually seen from other consumer product companies, rarely seen from Apple. The first rule of successful product development is to design your product the way people will use it, not how you want them to use it. It is an ongoing argument I have with most developers I’ve worked with. They see a simple solution to a user interface issue that will require users to learn how to use the interface in a different way than they had been. My retort is always: “But that’s not how they will use it”. We consumers are not stupid, but we don’t like to learn new things. When we do learn new things we want it to be a seamless approach, otherwise we balk. Apple forgot this lessen sometime in the last year.

Apple’s iPhone was certainly a new class of product; it used multitouch, it had sliding screens, no multi-tasking. But it was intuitive. My 1 1/2 year old’s favorite pastime is flipping through pictures or typing on both my iPhone and iPad. Despite the fact that multitouch was new, it was intuitive Even turning the device on for the first time was intuitive: you click on the big button, slide the button that says slide, and you’re in. Flipping the pages of your iPhone was like flipping the pages of a book.

The recent release of the iPhone 4 goes against the intuitive design sense that we’ve come to expect of Apple: if you hold it wrong, you’ll lose signal.

Now, according to Apple this is only happening to .5% of users and the media is blowing it up. (The takeaway from this should be that early adopters have big mouths, hate when things don’t work and are very adept at showing their displeasure through social media.) Steve Jobs says all mobile devices suffer from the same issue of signal degradation when a user cups the phone in it’s hand. Well, it didn’t have that much effect on my old Sony Ericsson that I discarded 5 years ago. Even if this is true as many antenna experts claim, the signal degradation was minimal or this would be old news. Apple’s second claim is that users, when holding the iPhone incorrectly, bridged the 2 antennae that make up the infrastructure of the phone. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is Apple’s assertion of users holding the phone wrong. This goes back to user experience and intuitive design: users will hold the phone the way they want, designers must make allowances for this behavior. Whether you’re a lefty or a righty we all hold a cell phone in a similar way. This doesn’t come from comScore or PEW, just a brief survey of people I know with cell phones, Apple or otherwise.

For some reason Apple decided to break up their 2-antenna frame at a key point where human hands would be gripping their product, thus causing the signals to be bridged and not work effectively.

It seems to me that common sense, with a healthy dose of real world observation would have given them a pretty obvious solution to the problem: change where the antennae break is located to a location that isn’t normally a point of contact for the human hand. Now, I don’t know much about mobile device development or antennae, but the problem, at least from reports from techblogs and Apple itself, seems pretty simple: avoid bridging the antennae. Does this help?