Agreed. This is the part of the article that I really took issue with:
> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.
There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.
In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.
All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.
>Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't. ...
>There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
I think that is the point he was trying to make. Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of "the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously." Having destroyed the ability to tell shit from shinola, they are now free to sell shit at shinola prices.
> Marketers have done all that study to completely destroy the ability of ...
Yes, they abuse whatever mean we have of judging quality to sell us their product. But that's not the point the article is trying to make, I think. That's my point: people care about quality. It's just that it's generally very hard to estimate the quality. And on top of that marketers are paid to make it harder.
> > You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
> Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end.
It's a bit of a tautology: people don't notice things that are targeted to guide them subconsciously. I don't know if that's the point the author was making; either way, it was kind of weak.
You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself. The articles is claiming that most people will not notice, even subconsciously, if, say, a laptop is well designed (say, whether it has a robust body, whether the keyboards clack, whether the function buttons and inputs are placed in usable places).
This is completely orthogonal to whether the marketing campaign for said laptop is well made and hits certain conscious or unconscious buttons to make you want the laptop.
Now, I don't agree with the author, but the reasons are completely different. I would say that differences in design that end users don't notice are not relevant. Any design school that holds that one design is better and another is worse where the end users of those products wouldn't notice the difference is, by definition, a form of snobbery and a bad school of design.
> You're confusing marketing of a product (and the quality of the design of the marketing) for design of the product itself.
Why did you read this confusion into my post? Was it because I'm using YouTube thumbnails as an example or referring to A/B tests that websites employ to measure engagement?
These were concrete examples used to describe abstract concepts relating to human behaviour. The quality of a design affects how a user engages with the product, how they feel about the product and how they enjoy using it. I never really considered "marketing" in my comment at all. I was talking about demonstrable design elements (composition, mise en scene, copy, typography) and how those elements combine to affect the quality of the finished product .. and how that quality impacts user experience. This applies whether the "product" is ad copy or a physical object bought from the store.
The thumbnail of a YouTube video is marketing for that video, it's not a part of the video itself. It's commonly quite divorced in tone (and sometimes even content) from the video.
It's also a good example: you can have an excellent video, but if the thumbnail (marketing) is not spectacular enough, people won't watch it. Another example about how people care little for quality.
> You may take pride in your craft, but the majority of people physically cannot notice the difference between good and bad design. Not even subconsciously.
Particularly the "not even subconsciously" part thrown in at the end. Because, if this were true, then YouTube creators would not pour an insane amount of effort into the THUMBNAILS of their videos. Marketing talent would not study human psychology and do A/B tests to figure out why certain ads sell products and others don't.
There is so much theory and study behind design, attraction, pattern recognition, contrast and standing out from the crowd that even though the average person doesn't necessarily notice how these strings are being tugged on, it doesn't mean that they aren't having an influence .
And I don't even mean to this to say "we're all sheep being brainwashed by corporations." That's actually far from my point. My point is that attention to quality affects the user experience regardless of whether the user can recognize or articulate WHY.
In a photograph, and think about YouTube thumbnails as a good working example, the "mise en scene" is critical for supporting the clarity of the message. There's a reason that the majority of thumbnails contain pictures of peoples' faces: the human brain is distracted by faces... so if you're trying to pull attention to your thumbnail, it's a good method. Why are these faces usually obnoxious? Because the facial expression also communicates the tone of the content and how the viewer is intended to feel about it. The ALL CAPS sections in titles and captions, while annoying, also has a purpose: to highlight key words that describe the promise of the video.
All of this speaks to the quality of design. And users might not know why they prefer certain designs over others. Why certain websites sell products and others don't. Why certain videos and articles get clicked on while others don't. That doesn't mean that, therefore, "most people don't care about quality." It means that, like you said, most people don't have the relevant domain expertise necessary to be able to judge why the quality of one design "feels" better than the quality of another.