On 9/5/07, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
Design, in the "ooh! it looks nice" sense, is utterly irrelevant to usability.
This is the traditional geek-response, and for geeks this is generally true, but for regular folks it's just silly. People like using a good looking system! Even if a system is really usable, if it is also really well-designed it is much more pleasant to use, and you can do it for a longer time. These kinds of responses ("Design is so gay! I like CLIs!") are really unhelpful and completely untrue.
But, fine! If the WMF wants headlines of WIKIPEDIA SPENDS $500,000 ON NEW DESIGN, it can have them.
Yes, that's exactly what I was saying! Precisely that! </sarcasm>
Honestly, it baffles me how people can think that the public face of wikipedia is unimportant. We spend War and Peace sized novels discussing the tiniest bit of minutiae in policy, but when it comes to things normal people (non-wikipedians) *actually* care about, we're flippant saying "Who cares?"
This stuff is important to wikipedia, whether or not it's important to you! Sticking our heads in the sand does not help.
--Oskar