Dear Gunnar,

Thanks for your further thoughts on Gerry McGovern. I have given this
matter some further thought myself. Since the debate seems to be
going further, I will add a few notes in response to your posts
yesterday and today.

In reading your earlier post again, it seems to me you are not
reading what McGovern actually writes. You seem to be so angry about
what you take to be his position that you are misreading his words.

For example, McGovern writes, "Much web design has suffered from an
over reliance on graphic design principles. Too many graphic
designers have tried to force the Web to be what it is not, in the
process creating ineffective and sometimes unusable websites. Quality
web design is driven by information architecture design principles.
Graphic design should support these principles."

You respond "he is attacking 'graphic design principles' without
specifying what that means. What is a reasonable observer to believe?"

This is a misreading. McGovern is not attacking "graphic design principles."

He states that "Much web design has suffered from an over reliance on
graphic design principles."

This is not an attack, but a problem description. The problem he
describes is not "graphic design principles" but rather, "an over
reliance on graphic design principles."

A doctor who says, "the problem in cases like this is an
over-reliance on penicillin," is not attacking penicillin. She is not
even attacking penicillin use.

McGovern specifies what he means by "graphic design principles" at
many points in his many columns and books. Since he cannot give his
entire view in a short column, it is easy to criticize him for a
failure to be specific.

He is specific if you want to read and locate his specific arguments.

It is a mistake to say that McGovern "intends to marginalize graphic
design and graphic designers or he just plain doesn't care." This is
not his view at all. What is the case is that he subordinates visual
artistry to issues that he feels more important.

As I see it, Gerry McGovern is doing serious work as a
research-oriented thinker. His position is clear, but it is not an
attack on design or designers.

You seem to have recast McGovern's arguments from a position into an
attack, and you have further made into a personal attack on graphic
designers. Since you are a graphic designer, my sense is that you
have misread McGovern's views as a personal attack on your
professional interests.

Rather than responding to the issues McGovern raises, you are
offering a counter-attack to an attack that he never made.

Your post to the list argues the importance of graphic designers
rather than stating the case for principles.

The argument in the next paragraph is an example of this. This
statement argues for the importance of graphic designers without
stating what value they serve to the site builder or the user.

This is not even an argument for the value of graphic design or
graphic design principles. It is an argument for hiring graphic
designers and placing them at the center of each design project that
touches in any way on graphic design.

-snip-

. . . And information architects, librarians, and organizational
planners who undertake websites should get the advice and services of
graphic designers and get the most out of that. Insulting,
marginalizing, and alienating graphic designers strikes me as
counterproductive at best. It tends to place graphic designers in a
subservient position that prevents us from doing our jobs well.

-snip-

This paragraph seems problematic in three respects.

(1) Some kinds of Web sites do not require graphic design advice.
Graphic design services are expensive. They constitute a high expense
relative to the low cost of developing and maintaining some kinds of
sites.

A site large enough to require an information architect may require
the services of a graphic designer. There are cases where a library
Web site simply does not, and neither do many small organization
sites.

(2) McGovern does not insult graphic designers. It seems to me any
sensible designer would tend to agree with him and prefer his
principles to the shabby work produced by so many graphic design
firms.

There is a reasonable explanation for why so many graphic design
firms do such bad work. Graphic design firms tend to be paid for
studio output rather than careful research or preparatory work. This
economic structure is common in the industry. It explains why so many
graphic design firms do so much bad work. They are paid to produce
sketches and work-ups. They are paid for make-ready costs. They often
take percentages, fees, and commissions on the services they buy for
the client, including production costs, programming services, related
print production, and so on. For most graphic design firms, high
billing depends on production output rather than pure consulting.
Financial pressures breed a production culture rather than a
conceptualization and testing culture.

(3) In many cases, graphic designer SHOULD be subservient to a
project manger or a design manager.

I had the opportunity to observe two related graphic design projects
organized around a similar theme. Both were anchored in large
government commissions for national representation.

The project managed and led by a graphic designer was a disaster.

Many outputs were problematic. Many were unnecessary. In several
cases, the designer opted for the kinds of projects that McGovern
would label "graphic design solutions." The worst and most expensive
of these was a custom-designed a typeface. The cost of developing
designing, and preparing the typeface meant reducing essential parts
of the budget. It pushed overall project costs so high that it was
impossible to deliver all promised outputs. The contract promised
research-based output. Once the contract was in hand, the designers
refused to fund any research that was not directly linked to studio
activity and billable design output delivered by one of the
participating firms. The only research the designer permitted
involved inspiration tours and sketches.

The project was an immense flop. It was announced with much ballyhoo.
In the end, the clients quietly scrapped it, and shelved the results.

A design manager managed the successful project. Designers worked
under the design manager's instructions. External designers worked
under the supervision of a chief designer who worked for the design
manager. There were modest problems, as there are with all large
public sector projects, but the general result was a great success:
everything was done well, delivered in good order, and on time. The
project met all project goals and the results were significantly
profitable, transforming many budget costs into surplus rather than
waste.

In this case, subordinating graphic designers to the project manger
was a natural element of project success. Allowing graphic designers
to control the first project resulted in the loss of the entire
venture.

I have also worked with serious, effective design firms who really do
solve the problem. In some cases, undertaking proper research eats
into profits. I was involved in a serious and generally successful
project with one firm that went ground because it was too good and
too thought. The project took several years to complete. It involved
a combination of private and public initiatives, and like the
successful project, it was intended to generate income that would
repay its own expenses.

The design group and I were so confident of the project values and
the research on which it was built that we agreed to take a
significant part of our payment in royalties during the surplus
period. (I took a greater risk than the designers did, since they
were also able to bill for studio production along the way.) Toward
the end of the project, the managing director retired. His successor
was a rival with a different political position.

The successor thought of himself as a "communist," whatever that
meant in 1996. He believed the state should pay for everything, even
though he lacked the budget to pay for what the services he wanted to
consume. He could not pay for our work. As a "communist," he also
disagreed with the idea of private-public partnerships and royalty
payments to designers. Since he could not pay us in advance, and
since our original contract terms conflicted with his political
notions, he cancelled the project rather than see us earn a profit on
the project surplus we would have earned for his organization. At
every step of the way, the designers were thoughtful, honest, and
professional. They solved the real design problems, and their
solutions showed every promise of major success.

Another designer whom I admire greatly has a research-oriented,
problem solving approach. He always asks clients to spend 10% of a
project budget first doing research on the problem before developing
a solution. I respect his firm because he always solves the problem.

In some cases, I might have preferred a different solution in
artistic terms, but this requires an ability to distinguish between
the aesthetic component of the solution and the functional component.
In many design problems, a general problem solution may be expressed
in specific forms.

As I wrote in my article1997 article, "Design Science and Design
Education," far too many designers impose personal artistic solutions
on clients rather than working to solve the problem. This is what
McGovern argues against.

McGovern is neither attacking nor condemning graphic design. He is
interested in the success of Web sites in terms of the readers who
want their content, and he hopes to help firms and designers
conceptualize better sites.

The analogy you draw to television preachers and politicians has
nothing to do with my approach. You write, "Using your 'majority of
cases' approach I would find myself accepting a variety of TV
preachers and smarmy politicians. If someone tells the truth most but
not all of the time and says 'I never lie and I'm always right and
always do things this way' then I have to conclude that there is
something wrong with that statement. It is absurd to respond by
saying 'Well, he's right most of the time' when the wrong things are
destructive and irresponsible."

This is inaccurate in two dimensions.

First McGovern does not "[tell] the truth most but not all of the
time and [say] 'I never lie and I'm always right and always do things
this way'."

You have drawn a caricature of his views, and you are attacking the caricature.

Second, and more important, you seem unwilling to acknowledge that a
position based on research can be correct in many respects without
being correct in all respect. Without getting into a debate on the
philosophy of science, I'll say that one might use words other than
correct here - words such as adequate, appropriate, substantive, and
so on, would do.

McGovern has studied thousands of Web sites over the past decade. He
has developed an approach to Web design based on his research. In his
book and articles, he articulates a series of ideas and principles
based on his research.

It is inappropriate to accuse McGovern of lying like a television
preacher or a politician. He has a research position. He argues a
case from his position.

Gerry McGovern has looked at more Web sites and done more research on
Web design than any graphic designer I know personally.

He visits about 3,000 sites a year, some 30,000 or so since he began
using the Web. He did his first formal Web study in 1994, and he has
done several hundred analytical and formal studies of Web sites since
then. He was involved with his first site design project in 1995.

This depth and scope of research provides McGovern with a substantial
empirical foundation for his views. Unless you have been visiting
3,000 sites a year, with formal research projects on a few hundred,
my guess is that McGovern has researched more Web sites than you have
done while doing a kind of research and an amount of research that
you have not. McGovern has been immersed in this field during a
decade in which you have been active in other kinds of design work
and in teaching design.

This means that McGovern's views deserve consideration aside from the
rhetoric you dislike.

McGovern has articulated a series of useful principles in his
articles and books.

If you strip away any rhetoric on which you may have a complaint, the
useable and clearly explained positive principles remain.

This is a discussion list focused on issues in design research. In
asking you to ignore the rhetoric, I ask you to consider McGovern's
research and the principles he articulates.

In reading the notes from the AIGA Experience list, my sense was that
some of the posts said the same kinds of things McGovern has said.

And even McGovern is not even opposed to special effects or fancy
design as long as they DO NOT INTERFERE with the primary goals and
purposes of the site.

Stephen Thompson's comparison of running shoes speaks exactly to this
point. People express style preferences for Nike over Etonics because
Nike running shoes are ALSO effective running shoes. In most cases he
mentioned, style preferences were an added value to function.

In some cases, function is irrelevant. In some cases, function and
even health are irrelevant. Piercing is case in point where people
prefer style to health and despite pain. That is not relevant to most
of us when we search for Web information.

Mr. Thompson may have "sat through hundreds of focus groups,
countless usability testing sessions," and the like, but I'd want to
know more about what he consider doing "tons of ethnographic
research, etc.," before I'd classify it as what I call ethnographic
research. (Read Bryan Byrne on the confusion among designers
concerning the nature of research and frequent confusion on what
actually constitutes ethnographic research.)

Much of McGovern's research involves observing how people actually
use the web. This is a different kind of research than asking what
they want and do not want. Many of his principles emerged from the
observations of actual usage patterns, as well as the other kinds of
research that one can do on Web reading, Web use, and Internet
behavior.

You may be right that his language is sharp. It is my view that he
has not given much attention to winning votes among graphic
designers. One could well argue that he would do better to court
graphic designers than to neglect their feelings on his writing style.

On the other hand, perhaps he recognizes that there may be little to
gain running for governor among designers, in contrast with straight
talk to a larger audience. It was my frequent experience that a
deliberate effort to persuade designers and to court their good
opinion made little difference. When designers discovered that basing
a solution on problems sometimes meant choosing against an artistic
solution that they preferred, they went for the artistic solution.
When they were told that research suggested that they could not
follow intuitive preferences, they often followed preferences.

Given the millions of unworkable Web sites designed by professional
Web design firms, Gerry McGovern simply may not care.

My concern is not whether most designers like what he has to say or
not. My concern is whether the issues and principles he states are
supported by empirical observation. That is a research question.

Whether McGovern speaks about designers in a way you do not like is
irrelevant. I think you misread him. Nevertheless, even if he really
did not like graphic designers, it would be irrelevant to the point I
raised. This is a research list, not a design promotion society. You
are here FIRST as a colleague engaged in design research colleague
and only second as a graphic designer.

I am asking you to place your identity as a researcher first.

This is the difference between a scientific debate and a clash of
positions among designers.

If you have a problem with McGovern's specific points or his research
findings or his thinking, explain what is wrong with his views on the
issues. McGovern's opinion about the graphic design profession is
irrelevant. You asked my opinion of his ideas, not his language.

Galileo was a grumpy old cuss who often and needlessly irritated his
opponents. The fact remains that his scientific observations were
correct.

Best regards,

Ken


--

Ken Friedman, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Technology and Knowledge Management
Norwegian School of Management

Visiting Professor
Advanced Research Institute
School of Art and Design
Staffordshire University