In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece. Visit site »
Just posted my second “callcast,” this time with @sketch22, talking about @readernaut and more. Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/5gmp3v
All-caps Gotham + blue gradient background + the word “Freedom” = Dell riding Obama’s coattails? http://tinyurl.com/5dx4d3
Nervous, anxious, and freaking out for no apparent reason. I hate it when I do this.
I bet no one can guess what song my neighbor is listening to today.
My cousin Brian, in response to the horribly bad Wall Street Journal article I linked last night. Funny. Visit site »