One would presume they are making a clear distinction between people who design for design's sake, and those whose design is a result of interviews, research, and testing.
How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.
The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)
> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?
Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.
If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.
Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.
i remember something similar with the ipod shuffle, that they cannot keep make it smaller only because the power button would be too small to operate, innfact the one that is like a piece of metal, the only way to easily slide the power button is with your nail
>Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.
Jony Ives goal or obsession is invisible computing that gets out of the way, so thinner is just on a trajectory towards that. No surprise he ended up at an AI company and works on voice interfaces etc.
True, but there are so many bad designers, working at famous places. The Liquid Glass person is the perfect example. So many well documented issues with unreadability with that.
Maybe, I agree that Liquid Glass is not nice, but staying always in the realm of the “nice but safe” is also not so great imo. Time simply preserves the good stuff and forgets the bad. Same with flat UI that came with iOS7 (?) - it was not so nice initially, but eventually contributed to the overall aesthetic direction of the whole industry.
This article is filled with pseudo self-help advice for people who now think they need taste to level-up their the LLM skills.
> it’s a trained instinct. The ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. It’s why some designs feel effortless.
This is not really what "taste" is.
Some designs feel effortless because someone practiced/trained so they could execute on their taste. Taste is extremely cheap - execution is still very hard.
Vulgar taste is cheap, but good taste requires, in my opinion, a great deal of exposure and study to develop, and even then also requires "an eye" i.e. innate talent.
There isn't a difference there in my experience. That "eye" is the taste, and before you start studying/practicing/training/doing - most of the time you won't know the "why it works" either. I'm not sure what "vulgar taste" would be.
Funny, I clicked on some of their projects. They had a popup drawer web widget. You can not choose how far it opens. It always slides all the way up or all the way down. I can't name how many times I've run into something similar where a form is in the drawer and the info I need to see to correctly fill it out is outside (or visa-versa) and because it won't let me adjust there is no way to see both pieces of info at the same time. Worse, if the form is in the drawer and I close it to find the info I need, it will end up clearing the form.
This is just the intro. If you keep on with the following articles, they're about visual effects for stacked notification popups. They have good visuals, but if you have a stack of open notifications, something is wrong. If you have enough that you need a stack, users are going to want some way to put them in bins, order them, and generally manage them as a to-do list, like emails. At that point, they're not notifications, they're incoming messages.
No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.
One of the biggest risks and sources of frustration in AI-native teams is an over-emphasis on taste leading to a doom loop where people (usually with product backgrounds new to the engineering mindset) spin their tires taking big swings unsystematically and without defining a clear exit condition.
I hope we as a community can develop the new agile or some sane process to ground ourselves in sooner than later...
I'm building a Vocaloid music player with Claude Code. It worked on day one, but the colors were still the pale purple from another app of mine I had started from. I changed them to Miku's teal. That was the part I had to decide myself.
I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad).
Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!
I see your point. I would argue that care and the protection of quality can take on many forms, but that behaving like Linus Torvalds is not a requirement.
I can see that viewpoint, and I guess it is legit to have it, however, first of all "behave like Linus Torvalds" is a shorthand that could mean a lot or nothing, and thus doesn't lead us anywhere, and, on top, what is correct gets determined by what works, and not by what feels good.
You've introduced a category that could be described as an alias for "bad", and then you threw in random stuff into that, based on unclear and handwavy criteria.
This can only end in a screaming match, so let's not do that.
Not interested in engaging in a screaming match at all. Yes, I've used an extreme to try to make a point, which is not great. :)
I'm curious, though: How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance? Do you have examples of such a behavior?
> How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance?
I don't, because I reject the definition.
Being inclusive does not mean "not putting people off". For starters, because measuring there doesn't work. How people react is not a direct reproducible consequence of your actions. Your actions might influence it, but they have this ginormous internal state that has much more control over it.
But that is a side-track.
The actual problem with the definition is that putting people off isn't bad.
Putting people off for arbitrary reasons like race, gender, etc is, but that "arbitrary reasons" is a strong modifier that significantly limits the set, and was dropped in your framing.
Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.
> If you’re a designer, don’t just use apps, study them. Why does a specific interaction feel good?3 If you’re a filmmaker, don’t just watch movies, think about why the director made the choices they did.
Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such.
Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.
Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.
Almost universally the worst designs come from designers.
Example: only someone who fetishized design would make a keyboard the didn't work just so it could be a mm thinner.
The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
> The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
So … designers?
One would presume they are making a clear distinction between people who design for design's sake, and those whose design is a result of interviews, research, and testing.
The difference is between designers who put their name on things vs. designers that serve users.
Or design-researcher :-)
If a person creates a design, they are a designer
∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]
The people who create the worst designs are designers
∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ W(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]
yeah but the best designs also come from designers
Yeah the worst software i know was developed by programmers
Sounds like user experience/UX with aesthetic as part of it.
The practicalities of "how it works" always seemed important to me.
How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
>How do you know Apple has not interviewed a broad and representative sample of real users and found that their #1 desire in a laptop is thinner and lighter than what is currently available?
>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.
The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)
> Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?
Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.
If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.
Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.
But phones still get bigger. Current phones are far larger than the phones from 2020 and those were larger than those from 2010.
i remember something similar with the ipod shuffle, that they cannot keep make it smaller only because the power button would be too small to operate, innfact the one that is like a piece of metal, the only way to easily slide the power button is with your nail
>Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.
Apple customers have a single demand: "make me look cool and high status"
Apple understands that deeply, everything they do is optimized for delivering that goal.
Jony Ives goal or obsession is invisible computing that gets out of the way, so thinner is just on a trajectory towards that. No surprise he ended up at an AI company and works on voice interfaces etc.
You’re using a straw man of a bad designer
True, but there are so many bad designers, working at famous places. The Liquid Glass person is the perfect example. So many well documented issues with unreadability with that.
Maybe, I agree that Liquid Glass is not nice, but staying always in the realm of the “nice but safe” is also not so great imo. Time simply preserves the good stuff and forgets the bad. Same with flat UI that came with iOS7 (?) - it was not so nice initially, but eventually contributed to the overall aesthetic direction of the whole industry.
This article is filled with pseudo self-help advice for people who now think they need taste to level-up their the LLM skills.
> it’s a trained instinct. The ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. It’s why some designs feel effortless.
This is not really what "taste" is.
Some designs feel effortless because someone practiced/trained so they could execute on their taste. Taste is extremely cheap - execution is still very hard.
Vulgar taste is cheap, but good taste requires, in my opinion, a great deal of exposure and study to develop, and even then also requires "an eye" i.e. innate talent.
There isn't a difference there in my experience. That "eye" is the taste, and before you start studying/practicing/training/doing - most of the time you won't know the "why it works" either. I'm not sure what "vulgar taste" would be.
Vulgar as in plain, common
the secret sauce here is talent, if you don't have it you'll end with an entire internet full of purple rounded buttons
I've always been a fan of Paul Graham's essay, "Taste for Makers". It's arguably more relevant today than when he wrote it in 2002.
https://paulgraham.com/taste.html
Funny, I clicked on some of their projects. They had a popup drawer web widget. You can not choose how far it opens. It always slides all the way up or all the way down. I can't name how many times I've run into something similar where a form is in the drawer and the info I need to see to correctly fill it out is outside (or visa-versa) and because it won't let me adjust there is no way to see both pieces of info at the same time. Worse, if the form is in the drawer and I close it to find the info I need, it will end up clearing the form.
This is just the intro. If you keep on with the following articles, they're about visual effects for stacked notification popups. They have good visuals, but if you have a stack of open notifications, something is wrong. If you have enough that you need a stack, users are going to want some way to put them in bins, order them, and generally manage them as a to-do list, like emails. At that point, they're not notifications, they're incoming messages.
No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.
One of the biggest risks and sources of frustration in AI-native teams is an over-emphasis on taste leading to a doom loop where people (usually with product backgrounds new to the engineering mindset) spin their tires taking big swings unsystematically and without defining a clear exit condition.
I hope we as a community can develop the new agile or some sane process to ground ourselves in sooner than later...
Exposing yourself to great taste educates AND inspires. I love Peters Design Company and how amazing they are at identity branding.
Here's an example of rebranding Uhaul. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMU0G8h0pys
I'm building a Vocaloid music player with Claude Code. It worked on day one, but the colors were still the pale purple from another app of mine I had started from. I changed them to Miku's teal. That was the part I had to decide myself.
I appreciate this perspective. Currently reading "On Writing" and would argue that Stephen King's perspective would be pretty similar to what's laid out here: surround yourself with good influences and your work gets better, and dissect why something is good (or bad).
Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!
It's great that we're calling for "taste" in software, but could we pick a less snobbish word? Like "care" or "empathy"?
No, we cannot. The abrasiveness is load-bearing.
Quality doesn't enforce itself and using soft language allows mediocrity to hide itself in it.
I see your point. I would argue that care and the protection of quality can take on many forms, but that behaving like Linus Torvalds is not a requirement.
I can see that viewpoint, and I guess it is legit to have it, however, first of all "behave like Linus Torvalds" is a shorthand that could mean a lot or nothing, and thus doesn't lead us anywhere, and, on top, what is correct gets determined by what works, and not by what feels good.
You've introduced a category that could be described as an alias for "bad", and then you threw in random stuff into that, based on unclear and handwavy criteria.
This can only end in a screaming match, so let's not do that.
Not interested in engaging in a screaming match at all. Yes, I've used an extreme to try to make a point, which is not great. :)
I'm curious, though: How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance? Do you have examples of such a behavior?
Now that is an interesting question.
> How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance?
I don't, because I reject the definition.
Being inclusive does not mean "not putting people off". For starters, because measuring there doesn't work. How people react is not a direct reproducible consequence of your actions. Your actions might influence it, but they have this ginormous internal state that has much more control over it.
But that is a side-track.
The actual problem with the definition is that putting people off isn't bad.
Putting people off for arbitrary reasons like race, gender, etc is, but that "arbitrary reasons" is a strong modifier that significantly limits the set, and was dropped in your framing.
Taste is overrated. Taste is an excuse for gatekeeping and a tool for exclusivity. Your work won’t fly because it lacks taste, whatever that’s it, defined by whomever.
all the enterprise was missing, all along, was taste
> If you’re a designer, don’t just use apps, study them. Why does a specific interaction feel good?3 If you’re a filmmaker, don’t just watch movies, think about why the director made the choices they did.
This is AI-generated.
people say taste is the differentiator but I hate that because taste is personal, whereas culture is communal
taste without curation for the community, with an eye to what is culturally edifying, is just consumerism
Articles like these are trite bullshit. Loads of great talent across the greater world of art that goes unrecognized. Nobody would call it good taste because hardly anyone can recognize it as such.
Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.
Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.
Don’t beat around the bush.
Would you agree that there's poor taste?
As much as there is good taste, with similar degrees of subjectivity.
Rough hewn "unfinished" fittings (tables, chairs, cabinets, etc) are the kinds of objects that bounce about the taste spectrum
I agree that there's poor taste :)