Engineers vs. Designers
Since its beginning, Google has been very engineer-driven and it showed in most of their products. They weren’t aesthetically pleasing by nature, but they got the job done. That has been changing a bit over the past year as you can see in this discussion, but for the most part the end result should be a product that gets the job done as fast as possible. Aesthetics were a bare minimum requirement.
Apple, Facebook and Twitter on the other hand are very designer-driven. Although Facebook seems utilitarian in their design, they employ a huge design team that spends a lot of time and effort to get the complex interactions that we deal with on Facebook to look simple. The difference between these three companies and Google though is that the designers and engineers seem to work in harmony. They understand the importance of the other and great products are produced as a result.
This however doesn’t mean there isn’t a rift between how engineers and designers think.
Designers evoke great delight in their work. Engineers provide utilitarian value. My original training was that of an engineer and I, too, produce practical, usable things. The problem is that the very practical, functional things I produce are also boring and ugly. Good designers would never allow boring and ugly to describe their work: they strive to produce delight. But sometimes that delightful result is not very practical, difficult to use and not completely functional. Practical versus delightful: Which do you prefer?
The Design Dilemma: Dismay vs. Delight
In a perfect world you shouldn’t have to decide between practical and delightful. In a perfect world they work together in perfect harmony to produce the ultimate design. The iPhone hardware, to me, is a result of this perfect synergy. It’s great hardware with practical ideas around it that follow a beautiful design. It’s delightful to hold and use. However, when it comes to being practical it can also be hard to add a bit of elegance. The easiest and most practical solution is never the most elegant, because adding in elegance is hard.
A Car
Let’s pretend that building a car is easy (and I know for some of you it is). When you have an engineer design a car you come up with this:
A bit extreme I know, especially since a lot more engineers are aware of the importance of aesthetics, but for all practical purposes this car worked fine for everyone. Now when you let designers go crazy on the design of a car you end up with something like this:
Cool? Yes. Practical? Not really. Somewhere along the line though designers and engineers have gotten together and produced some very beautiful and practical cars for us to drive. You are starting to see the age of the hybrid designer-engineer who is aware of both sides of the equation and knows how to make them work harmoniously to produce something magical.
What engineers and designers need to understand is that one side doesn’t work at its best without the other. Both sides can function without the other, but it isn’t about merely functioning, it is about functioning at the best level possible and this requires that engineers and designers come together and provide their perspectives on things.
Google+
I can only based these thoughts on the videos and intro that I have experienced with Google+, but it seems that Google is starting to see the value in aesthetics. Sad that it happened due to them trying to ensure that Facebook and Twitter don’t take over the world, but I’m glad to see it happen nonetheless. Wondering how a company so engineer-driven can make a change that is completely different from the core they have grown from?
Page, however, seems to recognize that this project in some ways requires a different approach from the Google norm. One variation that users will notice comes in interface design — conspicuously, in Circles. With colorful animations, drag-and-drop magic and whimsical interface touches, Circles looks more like a classic Apple program than the typically bland Google app. That’s no surprise since the key interface designer was legendary software artist Andy Herzfeld.
The former Macintosh wizard now works at Google — though he loves the company, he had previously felt constrained because its design standards didn’t allow for individual creativity. But with Emerald Sea, he had a go-ahead to flex his creative muscles. “It wasn’t a given that anyone would like what I was doing, but they did,” he says.
Traditionally, Larry Page has been a blood foe of “swooshy” designs and animations geared to delight users. He feels that it such frills slow things down. But Page has signed off on the pleasing-pixel innovations in Circles, including a delightful animation when you delete a circle: It drops to the bottom of the screen, bounces and sinks to oblivion. That animation adds a few hundred milliseconds to the task; in the speed-obsessed Google world that’s like dropping “War and Peace” on a reading list. “I’ve heard in the past that Larry Page he didn’t like animations but that didn’t stop me from putting in a lot of animations in, and Larry told me he loves it.” says Hertzfeld. “Maybe Apple’s resurgence had a little bit to do with it.” In any case, Google has recently tapped Hertzfeld as the design leader of the Emerald Sea team.
Engineers want things to be practical and work so its good to know that Larry Page still wants things to work the way he wants, but he also likes to see some aesthetics applied to these things. If Google can change so can you and your organization.
With that I will leave you with some final words from Don Norman.
Designers have a special way of seeing the world. Their ignorance of specialized content areas is their strength: they are not trapped by traditional thinking, they can apply new insights, new metaphors. The designer utilizes great representational skills along with a human-centered point of view. No other discipline trains its practitioners with this particular combination of skills. This unique point of view coupled with the specialized craft training in thinking and drawing is what leads to the power of great design.
Still, designers are mostly unschooled in the content areas in which they work. It is this combination of great insight and ignorance that produces my simultaneous delight and dismay. I wish that design training could overcome this dilemma. I struggle with an attempt to develop a new educational paradigm for designers (and for engineers, as well). Design education in most design schools puts the emphasis on craft skills. That is good, but insufficient. This has to change to accommodate the modern world. Meanwhile, I want everything: creations that are functional and usable as well as insightful and pleasurable.