Attack Of Design(back to home)

I had asthma as a kid, and my mother was pretty concerned about it. I don’t know if it was really as bad as she made it to be, but the result is that at least once or twice a week she would clean up my room to remove harmful dust. I guess I should be thankful, but the problem is that a lot of my stuff would get displaced in the process. Sometimes I might come home to find that a few papers had been shuffled around, or some magazine I was reading was now filed away god knows where. But I do remember a few times where I discovered on my return that my desk and bed had switched places for no apparent reason.
As you can guess, it was pretty infuriating for a teenager to feel like he didn’t have any control over his own room. And to this day I tend to leave stuff lying around, subconsciously assuming that it will get carried away by magical gnomes like it used to.

Why am I talking about my mother on my blog? No, it’s not because I can’t afford a psychiatrist. It’s because I was reminded of my teenage self’s feelings when reading the reaction to this Stack Overflow redesign case study by Dan Zambonini.

When reading the case study myself, I thought Dan made some great points. What’s more, he humbly acknowledged that for a real redesign he would’ve checked analytics and consulted with users. And it’s not like he criticised Apple.com or even Amazon. We’re talking about a site where you get this sort of things:

But to my surprise, the reactions in the comments were mostly negative. Here’s a typical reaction:

The design of Stack Overflow is about as close as is practically possible to perfect for developers.

What’s interesting is that last part, “for developers”. Do we really believe that a developer’s brain somehow works differently from other people’s, and that hundreds of years worth of design theory don’t apply to them?

I don’t think so. I think we should understand this “for developers” to mean “for us, Stack Overflow’s current users”. Just like I didn’t want my mom to clean up my messy room, users don’t want Dan to clean up their messy site. They’re used to it that way, they know where everything is, and it would take time and effort to change their old habits.

But the difference is that in my case, I was the only “user” of my room. In SO’s case, you might be protecting old user’s habits at the cost of turning new users away. For example, I feel like this is what happened with MySpace: if you had surveyed MySpace users around 2008, they would’ve probably said they loved the ability to customize their page and add annoying animated gifs everywhere. But the Internet as a whole clearly disagreed, and made it known by migrating to Facebook.

So what could Dan have done differently to ensure a better reception of his ideas? Well, the main criticism seems to be that he didn’t spend enough time using the site. Of course, I found that the whole point of his critique was seeing the site through a first-time user’s eyes. But what he should’ve done (and maybe he did this, but it’s not clear from the article) is write up his impressions as a first time user, but then use the site for a while before publishing them. The same critique would’ve been much more welcome if it had seemed like it came from the inside, rather than from some random dude just passing by.
Moreover, his title “designed by developers” —while probably accurate— was none the less antagonizing from the start since it set ups a designer/developer opposition.

I suspect this is why my criticism of Forrst was well received: I’m part of the community, and my comments didn’t trigger the territorial reflex that comes from seeing your beloved site criticised by a snarky designer (or, for that matter, seeing your stuff moved around by your mom).

Note: After writing this, I now realize that I could be vulnerable to the same criticism as Dan, since I’m not a Stack Overflow user myself. So just to be clear, I’m not interested in defending his redesign (even though I do like a lot of his ideas). Please see this article as a sort of meta-discussion on criticism itself.