Linear tells you right on their marketing site, the difference is Linear is opinionated. It’s better for software development because it’s designed for it, and worse at other things as a trade off.
A pen will write.
miryokuteki hinshitsu
A pen will write in a way that is pleasing to the writer AND leave behind ink that is pleasing to the reader.
http://particletree.com/features/the-importance-of-design-in...
Some great examples:
Steam. Epic's UI looks pretty, but Steam is more functional.
Amazon. A cluttered and messy UX (don't even peek at their APIs and backend). Yet a dominant e-commerce platform.
Workday. Yuck.
Toyota. Mazda builds prettier cars, but Toyota dominates Mazda.
eBay. Craigslist. HN. Reddit.
Design is important, but utility is where value is created.
I wonder if the audience is the key angle for looking at this.
For example:
- HN is beautiful and elegant to my eyes. So simple. So clean.
Adding some counter-examples:
- Most luxury brands' cars are beautiful for people who crave elegant things
- Airbnb looks amazing to people who care about great interiors
I don’t know about your other example except for amazon, which is definitely ugly as f. But then again, it’s “just” a retailer for standard stuff, and I know a lot of brands with nice-looking things that don’t want to be listed there. Also, on their purely digital product, I dig their competitors much more, e.g. Netflix over Prime.
I didn't quite get that. Obviously there are many partitions on "quality", Pirsig's is static versus dynamic, and what Zeno Rocha seems to be outlining is functional versus non-functional, an ancient distinction in engineering (SE).
But there's something deeper. The second type, "miryokuteki hinshitsu" seems more akin to "Je ne sais quoi", the perhaps surprising quality that is delightful, being neither something you needed or wanted but something you didn't even know you'd like.
Toward the end of the essay he nails something darker too - the misappropriation of that expectation that comes in the arrogance of some designs to presume to know the users' "experience". That is the sense in which I've sometimes found the concept of UX offensive. No designer gets to reach into the realm of subjective experience. It's something that Artists know, but where designers sometimes transgress.
That is the kind of quality where you can check off all the boxes in your process, but still don't necessarily have a good product at the end.