Beautiful design: The Pepsi Challenge of UX
Many years ago Pepsi ran the Pepsi Challenge:
The idea was a blind taste test, and Malcolm Gladwell suggested that Pepsi's success over Coca-Cola was because tasters will generally prefer the sweeter of two beverages based on a single sip, but the less sweet beverage over the course of an entire can.
UX design roles are almost always couched in terms like ‘creative designs’, ‘inspirational’, or ‘creative thinking’. While this may come from a good place, more often than not it stems from the usual misunderstanding about design: that design is mostly visual.
What does it mean to be creative? I would argue that creativity is a general human trait. No matter what they’re working on, when you’re on the inside doing the job, smart folks are the ones finding better ways to Get Stuff Done. Programming is regarded by non-programmers as a boring activity, but for me the joy of coding is really captured in this quote:
“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.” - Frederick P Brooks
In UX, creativity is found in the design as a whole, in understanding the problem in its’ broader context
Then into inspirational ux design
Ux that helps someone do their job quicker and better is a lot more effective than ux which focuses on being inspirational.
Beautiful lasts a moment. Effective lasts as long as the software
It’s be great if “ux that works really well” was a solved problem, but even a cursory glance makes it clear that it isn’t
The overstated importance of visuals
Visual design is sexy: I get it.