From Tech Review Interview with Jack Dorsey on Design:
http://bit.ly/opmL9B TR: What is good design?
Dorsey: A good design is naturally transparent.
How so? When you talk about Twitter and Square, you sometimes speak
about beauty, which is not the first word many associate with
software. What does "transparent" beauty look like in a website or
smart-phone application?
I think a lot of folks consider design to be a purely visual thing,
like the layout of text on a can of Japanese tea; but to me, design is
not visual but editorial. I ask, "What can we take away to get to the
essence of what we're trying to do?" What we're trying to do with
Square is accept payments. That's it, simply. So we want to remove
every point of friction between a user and his or her desire to get
paid.
Good design disappears from the user's point of view?
What I really love about a well-designed product is that you don't
think about it. It just becomes background.
You mean that how a product is used should be intuitively obvious.
Exactly. The phone in front of you on the table doesn't have an Apple
logo on its face. You know it's an Apple phone because it's so well
built and has certain design characteristics. But when you're actually
using it, the phone fades away. It's all about communications or the
content. I want that for Twitter, too, so that when you're using the
service, you get the immediate value. If Kanye West is your thing,
then Twitter fades away and it's just Kanye.
Square is the same way. We have two sides we have to address. We have
the merchant side—our users—and there are their users, the actual
customers. We want the experience to be amazingly simple and beautiful
for our users so that they never have to think about taking a payment:
they're just focused on selling whatever value they have. For the
customer, I want it to be equally simple: I should be able to walk
into a coffee store and order a cappuccino, enjoy it, and then walk
out and eventually question if I've paid or not. It should feel that
effortless.
BIO: Jack Dorsey is the creator and executive chairman of the popular
communications network Twitter. In 2009, he cofounded another company,
called Square, which lets people accept credit-card payments with
their smart phones. (See our March/April cover story on Square, "The
New Money.") At both ventures he emphasizes the importance of good
design; there is probably no aspect of product development he values
more. But design for Dorsey has a very particular meaning. He does not
stress the visual components of design; he is happy enough if a
product's typography is simple and straightforward. Instead, Dorsey
emphasizes the user's experience—and believes that the measure of good
design is that it should "fade away," allowing the user to find
serendipity in 140-character microblogs, or to quickly buy a cup of
coffee with a credit card. Dorsey spoke to Technology Review's editor
in chief, Jason Pontin, at Square's San Francisco headquarters.
