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I agree that web design is an undervalued and misunderstood profession. The point that web design is often viewed as a subset of another field is relevant, and both the practitioners and the clients are guilty of having incongruent concepts of web design. The ambiguity stems from the fact that the medium is extremely young with nary a tradition to define what’s to be valued. Consequently, people reach to more established professions to inform their expectations from a web designer.

From the client’s perspective, they may have had experience in hiring a visual designer in the past, as such, they fixate on the aesthetics a web designer can deliver. A designer spending time on semantic markup is an incomprehensible waste of time to that type of client. Others clients may be more savvy to software and view web design as a technology challenge. A designer careful to establish a cohesive visual language would appear to be spending too much time, as the client sees the technology makeup of the end result and not the hundreds of visual iterations that led to it.

There is also a challenge for web designers. Because the field is at the intersection of things such as graphic design, software development, interaction design, the practitioners are also, and tend to approach it in a way their pre-web-design background would have suggested. It is in reconciling the divergent value systems that web design is composed of and formulting a distinctly-web-design solution where the field’s ascention lies.

Clearly this is not a task for a robot.

posted at 07:16 am on June 12, 2007 by Ephram Zerb

2 Story Problems

I often use the analogy of story problems from middle school algebra class to describe what I do. That is: define a problem (i.e. simplify the wording), abstract it (concoct the appropriate formulas), then solve the problem (i.e. simplify the formula and solve for 0 [or whatever]).

The major disconnect I often have, with clients and non-web-designer coworkers, is that some people assume the “easy” part of this process is turning the words into formulas (i.e. defining the problem and planning its solution), and the “hard” part is solving the equation (i.e. using Photoshop or writing code). Which, from my perspective, is exactly backwards.

Perhaps when a client or account exec writes a “specification” or “agreement of work” they assume they’ve sufficiently worded the story problem. Or perhaps this is related to the neither-fish-nor-fowl nature of web design. That is: non-creatives assume the “hard” part is the artsy Photoshop stuff that seems so foreign to them, and non-techies assume the “hard” part is all that prickly code.

posted at 10:00 am on June 12, 2007 by Paul Souders

3 Could it be more difficult, please?

The consequence of the misconception described by Paul (thinking the hard part is about coding) is that who ever knows a bit of HTML or can use an HTML editor may think she/he can design a website. To me this kind of users/customers/stakeholders are the most dangerous and difficult to deal with.

I think our profession suffers from the fact that the technology we use is not difficult enough to handle!

posted at 10:31 am on June 12, 2007 by Raphaele Beyssac

4 Kraftwerk

A very interesting point, Jonathan, as many people think “techies” are robots and can just turn up the speed dial to get things done quicker, or add two people and get it done in a third of the time, as if web-design were a production line activity.

But I was most interested in your logic point. Some people assume A + B = C is the only logical structure and forget that judgment and experience is also a very strong element of logical processes and that there is not always a perfect conclusive solution to a logistical process.

I titled this Kraftwerk not only because of your highlighting the concept of craft, but because Kraftwerk were considered non-musicians, non-human, non-emotional in their time because they used computers to make music, specifically audio and sampler loops and specifically “machine”-sounding tones. But what they actually exercised was musical experience, emotional judgement and historical recall and understanding to create music many people enjoy on an emotional level; something humans don’t get from a machine.

Very often it is assumed that computers, because they are excellent at mathematical functions, they are somehow “smarter” than us. This leads to the bizarre conclusion that we can use computers, for example, to detect faces for identification. Whereas it is easy for us to recognize a friend after a radical haircut, a very powerful computer may be successful part of the time, only after quite an involved process of complicated coding, observation and comparison.

You highlight quite strongly the difference between automatic, mathematical processes and judgemental processes, and thus the difference why you aren’t likely to be replaced by a robot, or even a computer, in our lifetimes.

posted at 10:48 am on June 12, 2007 by Joseph Ortenzi

5 Misinformed...

Focusing only on your comments about computers being unable to generalize, you should be made aware that quite a bit is known about the mathematics of generalization. In particular, the field of statistical learning theory (see Vapnik, and the corresponding scientific conferences like COLT, NIPS, ICML, etc), studies exactly the problem of mechanized generalization (see also Bayesian statistics, information theory, computational learning theory, machine learning, http://wikipedia.com). In short, modern “AI” is far more advanced than you may realize (but still far short of human level intelligence). What is the case, however, is that generalization and induction have been demonstrated outside the brain. And from a theoretical perspective, “universal prediction” (see Solomonoff, Marcus Hutter) characterizes optimal prediction and, therefore, generalization under very weak assumptions (in particular, computability).

What’s particularly interesting is that most of these theories can be seen as a formalization of the idea of Occam’s Razor: given a set of possible explanations for some data, choose the simplest theory that fits the data. I wouldn’t worry about robots quite yet, but rest assured that thousands of scientists are working every day of the year to characterize “intelligence” mathematically as well as physiologically.

posted at 10:52 am on June 12, 2007 by Daniel Roy

6 Computers are We

Everything what humans created in the world are small parts of copies of themselves. Think about symmetry. Almost every object what humans carve, create, or design is symmetric. But not 100% symmetric (like a car – the steering wheel is just on one side) just almost symmetric, like the human body. And it’s not just about symmetric – humans always replicating themselves into objects, ideologies. Humans are transforms the nature via their own nature. We are converters. And this is the reason why I think there is nothing artifical in computers. Computers are We. The machines are part of us – externalized, materialized, mass-produced human thoughts. I believe in progression, and this is why I think everything is possible – it’s just question of time when will be a computer natural part of our life as a decision maker, generalized thinking, inductive-logic skilled ‘things’.

posted at 10:59 am on June 12, 2007 by Tamas Kalman

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I don’t think the problem is that the stakeholders don’t appreciate the web designers work. It’s more that they think that designing the web site is like designin a print ad in a magazine. So the specification is also like the specification of a print ad. “I want my web site to look like this: blablabla”. But the point is that to fulfill the stakeholders communication needs you need a information structure, not only a website structure. And that is what’s missing in the specification. So the web designers “invents” it. I agree that web design should be much faster, almost automatic. It can be, if the specification defines the information structure in a way that standard components of web sites can be used to fulfill.

posted at 01:31 pm on June 12, 2007 by Brain Lambert

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I think the posts illustrate perfectly part of your assertions. Web design is invariably lumped in as a subset of some other, traditionally known field. Scanning the posts, you see people dealing with the web design as advertising/print design hit the challenge of the client/stakeholder wanting it to look a certain way, but totally ignoring IA and content. And, the reverse for those in web design as software engineering, etc.

And while the lumping syndrome is definitely a challenge, Raphaele I could not agree with you more! Those who think “anybody” can make a web page are BY FAR the most dangerous.

I consistently battle the “well it shouldn’t be that hard, all you have to do is X, Y, Z right?…” from higher-ups who believe everything happens automagically as long as you have a “web program.” It can be challenging and, quite frankly, pretty disheartening and demoralizing.

I would love to hear from others the methods they use for educating/correcting this perspective.

posted at 02:23 pm on June 12, 2007 by Windy Phillips

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It is already reality that programs exits to easily create websites. But it is imposible that programs or computers will “design” websites. It is the same when you want machines painting an image. They can do that, but the results often not beautiful or just a copy of something else. The problem is to convince customers that there will be a roi, when a website is professional designed. I don´t have fears that one day a machine will do my job.

posted at 06:18 pm on June 12, 2007 by Katja Schiemann

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