My experience is that most people in business are 1) terrible at constructing trials, tests, or experiments, of any sort whatsoever, 2) terrible at interpreting the results of same, and 3) have a very limited tolerance for discussion of how bad they are at it and why their various tests are meaningless, no matter how gently it's presented.
I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up.
[EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
Remember that academia has a longer history as an accreditation vehicle for any concept you can come up with as long as you write convincingly enough, than as a platform of science since academia predates science by centuries if not millenias.
I think this tradition of authoritarian bullshit has some traction in the modern world still. Which in part causes all the silly pompous pseudoscientific bullshit.
Completely agree. In my experience every client I've worked with that wanted 'User Testing' or 'A/B Testing' would have lofty goals of having an awesome product backed by science, but at the end of the day were unwilling or unable to actually execute it in a way that did anything other than smush the data into the shape they wanted. They already have results in mind, they just want some data to support their conclusion so they can put it up on a slide for 10 seconds in a meeting.
I would go much further and say almost all "science" is done poorly.
The scientific method, when applied rigorously (!), is deeply uneconomical in the vast majority of cases, because the market has already eliminated most glaring inefficiencies by pure trial and error. Any possible gains are likely marginal anyway.
Doing a bunch of half-assed and meaningless experiments just to slap the prestigious "science" label on something on the other hand is very economical. So that's what people do instead.
Also, if you've studied human psychology in depth, you realize that the scientific method is a mirror of a very specific set of traits "owned" by a subset of humans.
If you're on the outside of that subset, it turns out that not only is it easier just to slap the label on, but your ideal customer (relative to your psychology) doesn't really care to do much more than a simple label check anyway.
From zero to 'rm -rf science-budget' in one marketing exercise.
A sad truth but coming around to it can help us understand why scientists need to work on social policy and outreach messaging as well. Scientific values simply will not sell themselves the way we think they should, outside of our little sphere.
Fortunately our cultural messaging has vastly improved in this domain recently. Bridge psychologies like that of Bill Nye are great examples of how this can work.
I'm also interested in what motivates this behaviour. Anecdotally I feel that the current incentive structure is entirely financial. People may get into a field to do good, but they have to justify an ROI on everything they do. Society fetishizes financial success and universally condemns financial failure.
Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all.
The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded.
I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science.
The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit.
It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.
> Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
So... my business school covered all of that. Probability, statistics, linear algebra, diffeq... and yes, boolean algebra in the context of gradient descent. Even Markov chains and neural nets. Needless to say, there was a lot of math.
Interviews at top business schools are nothing but partitioning and mathematical analysis. Google “business school case interviews”. Modern business is analytical and quantitative. Over 50% of my classmates came from software development or engineering backgrounds. This mix is not at all unusual.
I think your reaction may be to the PHB types — who aren’t good at any of that but they have soft skills (aka people like them) so they get promoted. Honestly the biggest truism in business is that it’s better to be liked than to be good.
The good ones are good at convincing, negotiating, charming, manipulating, uniting people, turning people against each other etc. All very important skills out in the real world of human interactions and they translate to $$ quite directly.
> C. The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system and into the future
> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating
an authentic Constitution of Design.
> B. Magnetic Fields: Magnetic fields exert forces on inner and outer surfaces of the Earth.
> B. Pepsi Energy Fields: Symmetrical energy fields are in balance.
> C. Magnetic Dynamics: Magnetic field are impacted by sun radiation and wind motion.
> C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.
Also, take a look at the deconstruction of the old Pepsi logos into arbitrary ellipses ("Perimeter Oscillations") on pages 8ff.
It gets increasingly surreal ("Light Path with Gravitational Pull" vs "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi", "Relativity of Space and Time" vs "Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle", difference between a "Pepsi Galaxy" and a "Pepsi Universe", ...) on the last pages.
I can't possibly be the only one here who understands what they were getting at, right? It seems silly but it's pretty obvious that they're just trying to get at the intentions and associations behind their aesthetic decisions. It's only as absurd as human pattern-seeking behavior is in general.
Well, you could take that literally, or you could take that as a marketing draft, where every idea written in the PDF would later be used as part of advertising.
Bullshit is what makes good video adverts rememberable. It just has to be unique bullshit.
Apparently that branding company is also active on the Wikipedia page for the logo:
> The subliminal advertising involved with the Pepsi Globe logo is also extensive. The different logos and packaging designs are purported to represent the human body, rediscovery of the Vitruvian principles and their publication, Chinese art of placement and spatial arrangement and many other representations that may not seem clear or obvious from just a glance at a Pepsi Bottle. The most famous visual representation is the Pepsi Globe logo’s representation of The Earth. The swirling horizontal stripe running through the center of the globe is claimed to provide a visual representation of the earth’s constant movement around its own axis and around the sun. The stripe also represents a naturally occurring electric generator in fluid motion generating and sustaining the magnetic field of the Earth. This marketing has resulted in an extremely recognizable logo and an aid to a profitable venture.
It still amazes me that they're persisting with the fat-belly logo. It looks like a fat dude with his belly hanging out. It's not something that, once seen, can ever be unseen, even years later. Makes me chuckle on the inside, every time, and plays its part in reminding me of dangers of pop over-consumption.
I never thought of it as a fat-belly logo, the mockup is pretty funny. I always thought of the logo as similar to a tennis ball. In my country, I remember Pepsi giving away blue/red coloured 3x tennis ball packs with a cases of Pepsi.
I was literally stunned how MS Office team was announcing icon redesign for their suite and how some part of the community was mindlessly applauding this breathtaking change as improvement in their lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YplAU5myNP4
Sure, it's something that looks new and good - minding how current icons are having a rather simple style to put it mildly, but that's not a technological advancement like introducing Ribbon interface in Office 2007. And sadly, that's how MS, Apple and others are trying to portray all these barely significant UI changes - as features.
Don't get me wrong, good looking UI is important but I'd be happy if cosmetic changes would remain cosmetic changes and be treated as such. I can appreciate visual improvements and work by myself and I don't need, want to be instructed by marketing teams to feel "enthusiastic" about such changes.
I can imagine the thinking on Pepsi's procurement end after all said and done:
"Oh yeah, looks like a modern version of our old logo - good! Seems like there's some golden-ratio-ey stuff behind it too which will have subliminal effects - bonus! Price is abit steep but only exceeds our budget by 10% - don't wanna cheap out either, so let's take it!"
Seems like money well spent in the butt covering department. If their new logo flopped and someone in charge said "I paid some designer $1000 to draw up this new logo" he'd be out of a job and blackballed from the industry. If he says "we spent a million dollars building this logo and had a study done to back it up!" then who can blame him we never saw this coming.
That's almost certainly what's happening. The pricing of logo design and branding is about how much it's worth to the client and how much risk the designer is taking on [0]. This design firm put its name on a logo for an international corporation worth billions of dollars and people made fun of it for looking like a fat dude; that's a major embarrassment whose potentiality was probably considered in the pricing.
The same people chuckling at how nonsensical the design document is supposed to be (and it really isn't) are probably the same people who could talk your ear off about the esoteric particulars of a given programming language or management strategy, which are also, to some degree, subjective BS couched in jargon and seeming non sequiturs.
Thank you @andybak, you made my day. Truly admirable document! This is the highest concentration of BS I have ever seen. I have to check who was the VP Marketing and CEO of Pepsi were at the time. They deserve a place in history for having bought that pipedream.
> Everyone bullshits at some point, but there seems to me to be a particular desire to show design decisions as being based in some empirical facts. In some ways this is admirable, and forces designers to justify their design decisions. Analytics have certainly been one cause of this.
As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Analytics implies time-dependence which is counterproductive to design when included upfront.
The only time quantifiable metrics are used is when a design is married to user experience in the context of a user interface (in the end product). At that point, patterns and practices dictate the baseline from which feedback takes place. This is commonly referred to as a design system and is done on a larger horizontal scale across interfaces (web, mobile, print, and so on).
Company branding, medium | message, target audience, color schemes/themes and other aspects of functional design are comprised more of intuition than raw analytics, in my opinion. Apple provides a great example of design choices that focus on the human aspect first. [0]
Added to that, the fact that market share is happily split amongst vastly different UI approaches is testament to the non-linear nature of design.
While designers are plenty, good design is not. Science based models as cited in the article are there to bring up the rear in a standardized manner but don't provide avenues to true "novelty" that defines great design. Just my two cents.
> As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive.
It's a highly trained intuition. From watching artists work, they have a tremendous amount of experience with color, form, different materials and composing those visual elements, and then with understanding the emotional impact they have on an audience.
> As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive.
Quite true. However there is some value in applying rational analysis to design, and doing it can help to be a good professional:
If your design is (partially) based on rules (like following exact ratios in proportions, applying color palette increments and color complements...), these rules create a design space that you can explore by changing the parameters to those rules in a systematic way.
This exploration allows you to generate * a lot * of slightly different possible solutions for the design, many of which you wouldn't have created spontaneously. Ultimately, you select the right choice by intuition; but seeing a lot of possibilities can help you to find details that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
I totally understand the desire to quote some exterior authority in the face of idiot managers whose nephew/niece once thought about going to art school and thinks that the font choice is wrong...
After all, if it's just your opinion then everyone has one of those, and why is yours so much better? Just because you've spent decades working on and obsessing about design, that doesn't make your opinion worth anything more, right?
But if it's backed up with SCIENCE, well that's totally different. You can't argue with SCIENCE, can you?
I basically agree, I think that most good design work is done based on intuition, but designers should be able to justify design decisions, and criticize them, based on objective criteria, especially for aspects of a design that further some functional purpose of a product rather than being simply aesthetic or decorative in nature.
"the minimum ratio of positive-to-negative emotions humans need over time to “flourish” to be 2.9013"
"It reflects the highest positivity ratio (observed ratio = 5.6) and the broadest range of inquiry and advocacy. It is also the most generative and flexible. Mathematically, its trajectory in phase space never duplicates itself, representing maximal degrees of freedom and behavioral flexibility. In the terms of physics and mathematics, this is a chaotic attractor.”"
They needed someone to write a paper to point out this was pseudoscientific BS? Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?!
Indeed. We seem to be increasingly awash with evidence that the standards of rigour in academic journals across a number of fields are... quite poor.
Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set out to demonstrate this in the field of grievance studies by submitting and, in some cases, successfully publishing a series of fake papers:
> Mathematically, its trajectory in phase space never duplicates itself, representing maximal degrees of freedom and behavioral flexibility. In the terms of physics and mathematics, this is a chaotic attractor.”"
Someone at Paramount is kicking themselves for not putting that in a Star Trek script.
I expected bad execution and missed confounders here. I also expected an impossibly-high effect size, the same way random priming effects were claimed to override basically all other factors in our lives.
I honestly don't think there is anyone who would claim that the current standards in social sciences meet the same degree if scientific rigor found in the physical sciences.
I can't find it now, but I read a crticism of recent physics papers that analyse partical collisions, because partical collisions are not deterministic and therefore have to be analysed with statistics. The criticism is that the manipulation of statistics to p-hack results is creeping into physics.
I've been involved in UX design for nuclear power plants, air traffic control systems, gambling machines, and more recently lots of web sites. None was "science" but all were very important for their intended audience. I the case of the nuclear power plants and air traffic control systems, there was much more thought and analysis put in by user interface specialists, but I doubt that any of those specialists would consider themselves scientists or their practice a "science".
As a field, I think UI/UX has a ton of anxiety about it's place in the cannon of design. There's a pretty clear path from that anxiety to these hollow attempts to justify itself as a "serious discipline."
Look at the other paths that visual designers could take, from "pure art" illustration to a much "harder science" like architecture, UI/UX sits pretty square in the middle. So many of the people I've worked with want it desperately to be both art and science. I'm sure we've all had conversations with a UX/UI designer who will ping-pong between space "feeling better" with different padding, and something like Millers Law, or perhaps a misapplied statistical inference from Optimizely.
I'd love to see UI/UX split into a more art focused design field and a more science focused HCI field. This might stop the navel-gazing and impulse toward faux-science, and publications like this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-shou...
I'm a little confused by the thesis of the article, and how it relates to the title.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, this is the thrust of the facts:
* The Android design team describes their design process.
* In their description, they cite a paper that suggests giving people at least 3 positive experiences for every negative experience they have.
* That paper was debunked.
How does that translate to "much of the 'science' used in design is bullshit"? That bogus paper they cited doesn't affect the actual content of Android's design; it just influenced the team's design process. How is that bad? How does that discredit all the other things they talk about? The FastCompany article[1] linked from this blog post says:
> the CliffsNotes version is that Google creates design mantras from the point of view of the user, like “keep it brief,” “delight me in surprising ways,” and “it’s not my fault.” Each time an Android feature lives up to these expectations, they get a single marble in the good emotion jar. But every time they fail, that bad feature produces three marbles in the bad emotion jar. The marbles illustrate that bad ideas stack up quickly.
Even if this heuristic isn't scientifically proven, does it really result in worse UX than if you don't use the heuristic? I just don't get the vitriol.
Later in the article the writer discusses how the "science" the designers say they were using probably had little to no effect on their design. The design is good, but not because of this principle. What the writer takes issue with is the attempts to justify design decisions (which may be fine on their own) with bullshit science.
"The veneer of mathematics and complexity science – a culturally-powerful yet poorly-understood science – allowed many people to believe a very improbable thing: that a simple model from fluid dynamics could explain the influence of love, hate, anger, sadness, grief, joy, culture, time, geography, war, famine, birth, etc. etc. on human behaviour. It also suggests a degree of gullibility in the academy: researchers were willing to accept the claims of the papers because they didn’t understand the maths. Worse, of course, is the implication that people simply don’t critically read the papers that they cite."
Pretty much sums up the reproducibility problem of studies in the field of Psychology.
No, it doesn't at all. The reproducibility issue in psychology has mostly to do with p-hacking, which is a very specific abuse of legitimate statistical analysis in which statistical significance is brute-forced and cherry-picked (rendering it no longer significant), and is often applied to otherwise sound experiments and hypotheses. The paper in question is literally gibberish.
Readit News
I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up.
[EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
I think this tradition of authoritarian bullshit has some traction in the modern world still. Which in part causes all the silly pompous pseudoscientific bullshit.
The scientific method, when applied rigorously (!), is deeply uneconomical in the vast majority of cases, because the market has already eliminated most glaring inefficiencies by pure trial and error. Any possible gains are likely marginal anyway.
Doing a bunch of half-assed and meaningless experiments just to slap the prestigious "science" label on something on the other hand is very economical. So that's what people do instead.
If you're on the outside of that subset, it turns out that not only is it easier just to slap the label on, but your ideal customer (relative to your psychology) doesn't really care to do much more than a simple label check anyway.
From zero to 'rm -rf science-budget' in one marketing exercise.
A sad truth but coming around to it can help us understand why scientists need to work on social policy and outreach messaging as well. Scientific values simply will not sell themselves the way we think they should, outside of our little sphere.
Fortunately our cultural messaging has vastly improved in this domain recently. Bridge psychologies like that of Bill Nye are great examples of how this can work.
Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all.
The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded.
I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science.
The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit.
It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.
> Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.
as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
Interviews at top business schools are nothing but partitioning and mathematical analysis. Google “business school case interviews”. Modern business is analytical and quantitative. Over 50% of my classmates came from software development or engineering backgrounds. This mix is not at all unusual.
I think your reaction may be to the PHB types — who aren’t good at any of that but they have soft skills (aka people like them) so they get promoted. Honestly the biggest truism in business is that it’s better to be liked than to be good.
> C. The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system and into the future
> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating an authentic Constitution of Design.
> B. Magnetic Fields: Magnetic fields exert forces on inner and outer surfaces of the Earth.
> B. Pepsi Energy Fields: Symmetrical energy fields are in balance.
> C. Magnetic Dynamics: Magnetic field are impacted by sun radiation and wind motion.
> C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.
Also, take a look at the deconstruction of the old Pepsi logos into arbitrary ellipses ("Perimeter Oscillations") on pages 8ff.
It gets increasingly surreal ("Light Path with Gravitational Pull" vs "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi", "Relativity of Space and Time" vs "Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle", difference between a "Pepsi Galaxy" and a "Pepsi Universe", ...) on the last pages.
Dimensionalize exponentially.
[0] https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...
Bullshit is what makes good video adverts rememberable. It just has to be unique bullshit.
> The subliminal advertising involved with the Pepsi Globe logo is also extensive. The different logos and packaging designs are purported to represent the human body, rediscovery of the Vitruvian principles and their publication, Chinese art of placement and spatial arrangement and many other representations that may not seem clear or obvious from just a glance at a Pepsi Bottle. The most famous visual representation is the Pepsi Globe logo’s representation of The Earth. The swirling horizontal stripe running through the center of the globe is claimed to provide a visual representation of the earth’s constant movement around its own axis and around the sun. The stripe also represents a naturally occurring electric generator in fluid motion generating and sustaining the magnetic field of the Earth. This marketing has resulted in an extremely recognizable logo and an aid to a profitable venture.
Sure, it's something that looks new and good - minding how current icons are having a rather simple style to put it mildly, but that's not a technological advancement like introducing Ribbon interface in Office 2007. And sadly, that's how MS, Apple and others are trying to portray all these barely significant UI changes - as features.
Don't get me wrong, good looking UI is important but I'd be happy if cosmetic changes would remain cosmetic changes and be treated as such. I can appreciate visual improvements and work by myself and I don't need, want to be instructed by marketing teams to feel "enthusiastic" about such changes.
They, literally, went full-on action movie for Office 2010.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I
"Oh yeah, looks like a modern version of our old logo - good! Seems like there's some golden-ratio-ey stuff behind it too which will have subliminal effects - bonus! Price is abit steep but only exceeds our budget by 10% - don't wanna cheap out either, so let's take it!"
The same people chuckling at how nonsensical the design document is supposed to be (and it really isn't) are probably the same people who could talk your ear off about the esoteric particulars of a given programming language or management strategy, which are also, to some degree, subjective BS couched in jargon and seeming non sequiturs.
0 - https://youtu.be/RKXZ7t_RiOE
Per the last 'update' of Gene's:
"In 1884, meridian time personnel met
in Washington to change Earth time.
First words said was that only 1 day
could be used on Earth to not change
the 1 day marshmallow. So they applied the 1
day and ignored the other 3 days.
The marshmallow time was wrong then and it
proved wrong today. This a major lie
has so much boring feed from it's wrong.
No man on Earth has no belly-button,
it proves every believer on Earth a liar."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMZdNyRIATo
https://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
And just a couple of days ago there was a paper and discussion on "Bullshitters" on HN.
As a designer I've always felt that the larger and more important chunk of design work is purely intuitive. Analytics implies time-dependence which is counterproductive to design when included upfront.
The only time quantifiable metrics are used is when a design is married to user experience in the context of a user interface (in the end product). At that point, patterns and practices dictate the baseline from which feedback takes place. This is commonly referred to as a design system and is done on a larger horizontal scale across interfaces (web, mobile, print, and so on).
Company branding, medium | message, target audience, color schemes/themes and other aspects of functional design are comprised more of intuition than raw analytics, in my opinion. Apple provides a great example of design choices that focus on the human aspect first. [0]
Added to that, the fact that market share is happily split amongst vastly different UI approaches is testament to the non-linear nature of design.
While designers are plenty, good design is not. Science based models as cited in the article are there to bring up the rear in a standardized manner but don't provide avenues to true "novelty" that defines great design. Just my two cents.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
It's a highly trained intuition. From watching artists work, they have a tremendous amount of experience with color, form, different materials and composing those visual elements, and then with understanding the emotional impact they have on an audience.
Quite true. However there is some value in applying rational analysis to design, and doing it can help to be a good professional:
If your design is (partially) based on rules (like following exact ratios in proportions, applying color palette increments and color complements...), these rules create a design space that you can explore by changing the parameters to those rules in a systematic way.
This exploration allows you to generate * a lot * of slightly different possible solutions for the design, many of which you wouldn't have created spontaneously. Ultimately, you select the right choice by intuition; but seeing a lot of possibilities can help you to find details that you wouldn't have considered otherwise.
After all, if it's just your opinion then everyone has one of those, and why is yours so much better? Just because you've spent decades working on and obsessing about design, that doesn't make your opinion worth anything more, right?
But if it's backed up with SCIENCE, well that's totally different. You can't argue with SCIENCE, can you?
"It reflects the highest positivity ratio (observed ratio = 5.6) and the broadest range of inquiry and advocacy. It is also the most generative and flexible. Mathematically, its trajectory in phase space never duplicates itself, representing maximal degrees of freedom and behavioral flexibility. In the terms of physics and mathematics, this is a chaotic attractor.”"
They needed someone to write a paper to point out this was pseudoscientific BS? Not only that, but the paper was cited over 1000 times?!
Absolutely terrifying.
Indeed. We seem to be increasingly awash with evidence that the standards of rigour in academic journals across a number of fields are... quite poor.
Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose set out to demonstrate this in the field of grievance studies by submitting and, in some cases, successfully publishing a series of fake papers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZZNvT1vaJg
I mean, in some sense this is highly entertaining for the rest of us, but it is also utterly horrifying.
No researcher has the time to read all the papers published in their field.
There are no penalties for publishing bad science, and no rewards for debunking it.
Recent moves to stop p-hacking by removing the need to show statistical significance will (if they get through) only make this worse.
Something has to change.
With a bit of mining, you could probably identify other likely BS papers by looking at what they cite. Has that been done before?
Yep. http://www.citnetexplorer.nl/
Someone at Paramount is kicking themselves for not putting that in a Star Trek script.
I didn't expect outright gibberish.
Deleted Comment
Look at the other paths that visual designers could take, from "pure art" illustration to a much "harder science" like architecture, UI/UX sits pretty square in the middle. So many of the people I've worked with want it desperately to be both art and science. I'm sure we've all had conversations with a UX/UI designer who will ping-pong between space "feeling better" with different padding, and something like Millers Law, or perhaps a misapplied statistical inference from Optimizely.
I'd love to see UI/UX split into a more art focused design field and a more science focused HCI field. This might stop the navel-gazing and impulse toward faux-science, and publications like this: https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/why-designers-shou...
Unless I'm reading it wrong, this is the thrust of the facts:
* The Android design team describes their design process. * In their description, they cite a paper that suggests giving people at least 3 positive experiences for every negative experience they have. * That paper was debunked.
How does that translate to "much of the 'science' used in design is bullshit"? That bogus paper they cited doesn't affect the actual content of Android's design; it just influenced the team's design process. How is that bad? How does that discredit all the other things they talk about? The FastCompany article[1] linked from this blog post says:
> the CliffsNotes version is that Google creates design mantras from the point of view of the user, like “keep it brief,” “delight me in surprising ways,” and “it’s not my fault.” Each time an Android feature lives up to these expectations, they get a single marble in the good emotion jar. But every time they fail, that bad feature produces three marbles in the bad emotion jar. The marbles illustrate that bad ideas stack up quickly.
Even if this heuristic isn't scientifically proven, does it really result in worse UX than if you don't use the heuristic? I just don't get the vitriol.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1672657/google-s-dead-simple-too...
The habit of relying on dubious techniques is under question here, as is our collective ability to find better guidance.
Pretty much sums up the reproducibility problem of studies in the field of Psychology.