I read two posts on American car industry today.
The first post, Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s, blames the problems plaguing the American car industry on the fact that the industry is led by MBAs and not the product guys.
The second post by Paul Graham, talks about why American cars are so ugly. I am reproducing the content from graham's post lest you get lost in the rambilisiously long post:
An ugly website or a website with a messed up UI not only wastes time but also makes the designer/owner look like a fool in the mind of the user, harming his credibility. It is like an envelope without an address on it.
With the country harvesting a crop of lakhs of Engineers every year, most of whom possessing at least miniscule design abilities, isn’t it an irony that the grading system doesn’t give a heck to the ‘design paradox’. The sad truth is we still talk about IQ and EQ. It is high time we roll our eyes on to AQ (Aesthetic Quotient) lest our websites will pinch pennies and waste opportunities to earn thousands.
The first post, Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s, blames the problems plaguing the American car industry on the fact that the industry is led by MBAs and not the product guys.
The second post by Paul Graham, talks about why American cars are so ugly. I am reproducing the content from graham's post lest you get lost in the rambilisiously long post:
A similar problem explains why American cars are so ugly. I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer? By definition you can't tell from his portfolio. And you can't go by the awards he's won or the jobs he's had, because in design, as in most fields, those tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. There's no way around it: you can't manage a process intended to produce beautiful things without knowing what beautiful is. American cars are ugly because American car companies are run by people with bad taste.
The Indian websites
suffer the same fate as the American cars, ugliness. Imagine tolerating
Fluorescent Green for the sky instead of Blue. It is amazing to me how the
websites, the sole existence of which is justified by their effectiveness in
communicating with the user, fall so distorted, faceless and silent. Is the
reason same as elicited by Graham? Do the web designers lack the required
Aesthetic Quotient? Or is it that the companies earning 10 figure incomes don’t
possess the taste buds for the web - chaat.
An ugly website or a website with a messed up UI not only wastes time but also makes the designer/owner look like a fool in the mind of the user, harming his credibility. It is like an envelope without an address on it.
With the country harvesting a crop of lakhs of Engineers every year, most of whom possessing at least miniscule design abilities, isn’t it an irony that the grading system doesn’t give a heck to the ‘design paradox’. The sad truth is we still talk about IQ and EQ. It is high time we roll our eyes on to AQ (Aesthetic Quotient) lest our websites will pinch pennies and waste opportunities to earn thousands.
