Aesthetics via Information Architects

Following on the heels the previous tweet, there’s this piece from the ever insightful folks over at ia.net. Here are a few of the pieces that stood out to me.

Not the master designer but the user is the arbitrator of good design.

The world was sucked into a medium that allowed measuring the performance of forty-one shades of blue. And thus the notion of good and bad design radically changed. Design used to be about sensitivity, beauty, and taste. Today, design is about what engages users and grows profits.

The key performance indicator for design has changed from beauty to profit. Measuring design has transformed a handicraft into an engineering job. The user is king. The user decides what is good and what is bad design

We are also beginning to realize eliminating what is not measurable may come at an unmeasurable cost.

How much of what us human is truly measurable and verifiable?

How do we measure friendship? By the number of replies per month? By the length of replies? With computer linguistics? How do we measure usefulness? Lots of page views? Few page views? Stickiness? Number of Subscriptions? How do we measure trust? By the number of likes? Retweets? Comments? How do we measure truth?

However, out of experience, we know those good things are rare, that quality always comes at a price and that the price tag of quality grows exponentially.

We also know that what is truly good is somehow beautiful, and what is truly beautiful is somehow good. It’s not a direct relationship, it’s a deeper connection.

My comment: Silicon Valley’s law: all software problems will be resolved with more software