Posted by Craig Fitzpatrick
10 days ago


I’ve often had discussions with people about the importance of design in software. By design, I mean things like: usability (= learnability + productivity), ergonomics and plain ol’ appeal (after all, you want people to use and like your software don’t you?) I’ve been known to drive developers nuts moving things around on screen, and even became known to a few as “2 pixel boy”, because I’d always be asking developers to move their textbox labels up or down 2 pixels to make sure the baseline of the text in the label matched the baseline of the text inside the text area. Basic stuff in my opinion, but continually overlooked by many.




Clearly there are a couple of camps on the relative importance of design. You know, the form vs. function debates. I won’t recreate that debate here, but I am pleased to see what I think will be a new bias being adopted by the general public in the coming years.




I believe that “elegance” is going to make a big come-back. I think we’re exiting the age of utility development (having laid working infrastructure) and entering a new age of craftsmanship.




From a business perspective, here are the trends I see that I believe are the signals of a shift on emphasis from “cramming features onto the brochure” to “crafting” an elegant solution to each software problem: