Baldur Bjarnason
“Adactio: Links—Design as (un)ethical illusion” adactio.com/links/17989
Design as (un)ethical illusion
Many, if not all, of our world’s most wicked problems are rooted in the excessive hiding of complexity behind illusions of simplicity—the relentless shielding of messy details in favor of easy-to-use interfaces.
But there’s always a tradeoff between complexity, truth, and control. The more details are hidden, the harder it is to understand how the system actually works. (And the harder it is to control). The map becomes less and less representative of the territory. We often trade completeness and control for simplicity. We’d rather have a map that’s easy to navigate than a map that shows us every single detail about the territory. We’d rather have a simple user interface than an infinitely flexible one that exposes a bunch of switches and settings. We don’t want to have to think too hard. We just want to get where we’re going.
Seamful and seamless design are reframed here as ethical and deceptive design:
Ethical design is like a glove. It obscures the underlying structure (i.e. your hand) but preserves some truth about its shape and how it works. Deceptive design is like a mitten. It obscures the underlying structure and also hides a lot about its shape and how it works.
Responses
Related links
Revisiting Adaptive Design, a lost design movement (Interconnected)
This sounds like seamful design:
How to enable not users but adaptors? How can people move from using a product, to understanding how it hangs together and making their own changes? How do you design products with, metaphorically, screws not nails?
Make Me Think | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
The removal of all friction should’t be a goal. Making things easy and making things hard should be a design tool, employed to aid the end user towards their loftiest goals.
Make me think! – Ralph Ammer
This is about seamful design.
We need to know things better if we want to be better.
It’s also about progressive enhancement.
Highly sophisticated systems work flawlessly, as long as things go as expected.
When a problem occurs which hasn’t been anticipated by the designers, those systems are prone to fail. The more complex the systems are, the higher are the chances that things go wrong. They are less resilient.
Dark Patterns Detective
Deceptive design meets gamification in this explanatory puzzle game (though I wish it weren’t using the problematic label “dark patterns”).
I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.
Nuberodesign > Blog > In Praise of Buttons – Part One
I concur:
Just because a user interface uses 3D-buttons and some shading doesn’t mean that it has to look tacky. In fact, if you have to make the choice between tacky-but-usable and minimalistic-but-hard-to-use, tacky is the way to go. You don’t have to make that choice though: It’s perfectly possible to create something that is both good-looking and easy to use.
Related posts
Seamfulness
Expose the connections.
Deceptive dark patterns
A modest proposal for incrementally adjusting our terminology.
Installing Progressive Web Apps
Trying to get the balance right between discoverability and intrusiveness.