When is ok to be a little bit crap?
When you’re bloody marvellous at lots of other stuff.
Robert Capp of Wired Magazine US recently noted a burgeoning trend amongst consumers of digital media (meaning pretty much all of us). A trend where people are willing to sacrifice the traditional values of quality; crisp resolution, high fidelity, limitless features and sleek product design, opting instead for cheap, simple, accessible low-end products. And it’s not just soap-dodging freegans either, it’s everyone. Capp calls this the ‘good enough’ phenomenon.
It is a shift that most notably rocked the music industry at the turn of the century with the popularisation of compressed music files. The MP3 was initially laughed off as a format by many record labels because its sound quality was so inferior compared to that of the CD. What they didn’t bank on was the fact that their customers valued its functionality over its fidelity. It was more important to them, to us, to be able to carry all our music in our pocket, manipulate playlists and share favourites than it was to hear every quiet intake of breath between verses.
Ok, so an obvious example but one of many. Capp notes in his article of one of the biggest commercial successes of last year, a newcomer that took an established market by storm, breaking all the rules along the way. The ‘Flip’ digital video camera sacrificed features and resolution (the holy grails of it’s competitors) in exchange for ease of use and accessibility through price. What its makers realised is that a huge percentage of people take video for the sole purpose of putting it on the internet. With the low screen resolutions of Youtube ultimately dictating the appearance of a video file, investments in expensive hi-def cameras were a little pointless. They exploited this gap by creating a product that was cheap, not great, but just about good enough. Customers couldn’t get enough.
Other examples include the recent glut of netbooks. Low power and low memory but their handbag-ability is attracting millions. Conventional telephone and television services are under increased pressure from laggy Skype calls and the forthcoming pixely Hulu respectively.
A clever man called Pareto worked out a little formula for the reason behind this sort of consumer behaviour. His 80/20 rule states that only around 20% of the features and attributes of a product or service deliver 80% of its value to consumers. This means products can be dramatically simplified and cut back while still delivering on the majority of what a customer wants from it.
It’s a trend that is obviously suited to a time of recession but I was intrigued whether this trend could have any impact on a design industry which is very attached to the traditional values of quality – accuracy, rigour, crafting…
All good design begins with its audience and for most designers ease of use and coherent functionality have always been a priority but what happens if you’re audience doesn’t seem to care what something looks like. The first Flips but for example were light, nimble and robust but looked like 80’s hand held computer game. Far removed from the sleek apple chasing design of its nearest competitors.
If companies are looking to strip back products and services then design, or at least slowly polished, honed design, will usually be one of the first in line to the chopping block. Just because good design can improve something doesn’t make it necessary.
Online is where the most interaction between design and good enough media occurs with examples such as YouTube, Hulu and to a certain extent Facebook and Gumtree. These digital platforms dominate the internet commanding huge audiences but I can’t think of one that gets me excited about the design. That, I think, may be the point.
One thing is very common among across these service orientated purveyors of the good enough and that is a sense of graphic restraint. Whether by design or disability there is a resistance to data hungry animated slide transitions, sexy textured finishes and designers-eye micro detailing. On these sites branding is very quiet with the content very much the King. It is the experience that is the visual, what you see is what the site allows you to do and that in itself is delightful.
Channel 4 and the BBC’s online media portals feel overdesigned compared to YouTube and Hulu. If find the flash animated rollovers and dramatic dark backgrounds distracting. Sure these graphic layers signal to me who is providing this content but are they actually adding anything to my experience? By contrast YouTube’s brand is present in its function rather than its aesthetic.
This, I think, is the good enough version of design, an ‘is what it is’ aesthetic that has shown people that they don’t need and sometimes don’t want extra layers of graphics and marketing applied to this type of experience.
Something proven by the kings of lo-fi graphics Google. Google generates 90% of its income through it’s adverts but they only appear in one colour, at one size with no images. These good enough communications have swapped expansive online real estate and expensive digital campaigns for simple, targeted, basic messaging. Just as the Flip camera did with the video market, these ads challenge what we think of as a good advertising campaign. They reflect the way people consume media and they do so in a way that is less intrusive but conclusively as effective.
Google text ads
I do find one flaw with the good enough phenomenon and that is the name itself. It infers shoddiness when in fact at its most effective what it describes is balance. Finding the perfect relationships between sound quality and portability, materials and affordability, contemporary design and functionality. It’s the people who get these relationships right that are finding success now and as competition in this field grows and these relationships are rethought the principles will remain.
For design in particular this signals no major changes and it certainly doesn’t mean dropping high standards but it does highlight a change in how those standards might be set. Goalposts slightly shifted by the mouse-clicks of a worldwide vast majority, each whispering a small word in the ear, that visual dexterity and digital trickery come a distant second to ease of use and accessibility. If the experience is seamless and it looks amazing–job done, but impede on basic function and open the door to unseen competitors.
It’s not just a good design principle it’s what people want, now more than ever, and they’re voting with their repetitively strained, mouse clenched hands.
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I wonder if there’s a little more to it than just being ‘good enough’. The fact that both Google and Youtube were some of the first in their respective markets has a big role to play too.
The ‘good enough’ principle can only come into play once an audience has discovered the service in question, and Google and Youtube were certainly their from the off.
These two sites are also examples of focusing on specific tasks, just as Flickr and Amazon represent awful interface design - yet market leadership in their areas.
Google’s founders were adamant that users didn’t want to hang around on their site and so simply avoided the masses of content that rivals like Yahoo were offering. You could argue that Google represented the first pure search site, unlike the Yahoo and Lycos models which aimed at being internet portals.
‘Good enough’ is fine, but you have to be first in the queue and know your audience if it’s going to work.
Google definitely wasn’t the first, but it did it’s job simply and effectively without any fuss.
I think also what we are dealing with is the fact that a lot of people are turned off by stuff that looks too designed. There are two types of design that the mainstream embrace: simplicity (the iPod was a success because it looked and was so simple), and “undesign” (MySpace looks like it was thrown together by apes but people liked the inclusiveness of it… something that Virb failed to understand, only appealing as it did to other designers).
A lot of sites which started off basic but were usable, have now become monsters of 2.0 flashiness and are no longer as easy to use - sections of the BBC site are a good (bad) example of this.
Personally I think the web should be all about the “good enough” aesthetic… it’s mainly about getting information quickly and intuitively. Everything else is just the designer’s masturbation.
and as for the term “good enough”… well, it’s good enough.
Matt - I think you’re right, a lack of real competition is perhaps why these kinds of services don’t need to keep innovating their design. What they have shown us though is that a stripped down lean service with matching aesthetic is extremely effective. 5-10 years ago, to beat competition might have meant adding extra features, adding movement and gloss, now companies should be looking at what can they get rid of to streamline the service. I didn’t give the whole story about the flip, which with increased competition from the big brands has added expressive covers and a sleeker design. As you said - good enough was only good enough when it was relatively peerless.
Manny - Good point. I think it’s really interesting to see just how people consume information on the net now. Short text snippets, links, aggregated stories, basic default text layouts. Read a story from the guardian on your iphone and bar the masthead its flowed in arial with images and to be honest… that’s what i want. But there is definitely huge scope for designers - I find twitter hard to read, craigslist is a mess. I sure we’ll see a site soon which which fully embraces this mode of consumption and addresses its design shortcomings. A kind of web neo-modernism.
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Interesting article, and one which could have been improved by proof-reading before posting. I found myself mentally correcting your mistakes (so the article made sense) on too many occasions for it to go unnoticed.
Aside from that, I agree with Manny when he says “it’s mainly about getting information quickly and intuitively”… simplicity on the Web is key.