I hate when people say "Design is nothing, content is what matters..."
Design is absolutely essential... but only if everybody else is doing it.
(In that sense, it is a bit like advertising.)
Design and advertising are distorting the free market. We cannot see if one product is better than the other by looking at its design. We can only conclude that one company has put more effort into the design of a product, than another company and from there we often end up with the fallacy of concluding that one product must be better than another.
However, advertising and design nowadays only show that one company has bigger pockets. Or, in other words, money is spoiling (through design and advertising) the evolutionary properties (in terms of quality) of the free market.
From the moment that you acknowledge that red text on a blue background is hard to read and makes a product genuinely worse, you must acknowledge that the design of a product is a legitimate part of a product.
Design and usability go hand in hand, and _of course_ a product's usability is a genuine part of the feature matrix of products. Sure, some design differentiation is "marketing" , but you also have designs that genuinely make a product better/worse.
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Design is absolutely essential... but only if everybody else is doing it.
(In that sense, it is a bit like advertising.)
Design and advertising are distorting the free market. We cannot see if one product is better than the other by looking at its design. We can only conclude that one company has put more effort into the design of a product, than another company and from there we often end up with the fallacy of concluding that one product must be better than another.
However, advertising and design nowadays only show that one company has bigger pockets. Or, in other words, money is spoiling (through design and advertising) the evolutionary properties (in terms of quality) of the free market.
woah woah woah, let's step back a second.
From the moment that you acknowledge that red text on a blue background is hard to read and makes a product genuinely worse, you must acknowledge that the design of a product is a legitimate part of a product.
Design and usability go hand in hand, and _of course_ a product's usability is a genuine part of the feature matrix of products. Sure, some design differentiation is "marketing" , but you also have designs that genuinely make a product better/worse.