SXSW Interactive: Saturday PanelsSXSW Interactive: Saturday Panels
Getting to Consistency: Don't Make Your Users Think stressed that consistency should not become legacy. While people (or what the detached refer to as "users") value comfort and familiarity, what works best evolves over time. Embrace change as long as the benefits are obvious. It reminded me of Taylor's conversation with Chirag about the pros and cons of two possible user interfaces. They went with the one that was less common but more usable.
Grids Are Good and How to Design with Them reassured me that the principles learned in my print design courses still apply to the Web. Khoi and Mark went through the steps of creating a grid-based layout through a combination of math and eyeballing it. See the results for yourself.
Beautiful Algorithms: Design from Nature and Mathematics showed how algorithms generate beauty in both nature and technology. Like the reaction-diffusion patterns found on tropical fish, or the L-systems and self-similarity of plants. I'm glad Alec focused on real-world and simulated examples of this stuff and not on the crazy formulas behind it all. It was reminiscent of the movie Pi, where a paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature. Just listen to the sample at the end of Jedi Mind Tricks' "Speech Cobras."
High Class and Low Class Web Design juxtaposed "good" and "bad" designs, focusing on the success of culprits like MySpace, Craigslist and eBay. Paul Rand famously said:
The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.
But I think it's important to remember -- and this was brought up during the Q+A session -- that good and bad are not equivalent to beautiful and ugly. Usability and the audience's immediate goals should be prioritized, otherwise they won't come back no matter how pretty the design is.
Photo by Andy Couch
