Balancing Creativity and Usability
A short comment on “Why Do All Websites Look the Same?”
Last week, Medium has featured my most recent essay Why Do All Websites Look the Same? (aka “On the visual weariness of the web”). The essay is currently getting a lot of attention. While I am writing this, it has received over 55.000 views, 27.000 reads, 11.300 claps and 60 comments. I obviously hit a nerve.
So — thanks for all the feedback! It’s great to initiate a lively debate! But it is difficult for me to address each remark individually. The feedback I got is diverse and the comments on Medium and Twitter are quite controversial. Without going into the details, a lot of the discussion boils down to the well-known “creativity against usability” argument.
My essay is certainly full of polemics. I criticise a specific trend towards a template-driven web that leaves very little breathing space for innovative and challenging design approaches. I do not criticise usability per se. That would be absurd and a complete misinterpretation of my text.
The whole “creativity against usability” debate is running for over 100 years now. As I wrote before, it is deeply linked to technological developments and industrial revolutions. History has shown that we need both — creativity and usability — in order to make real progress…
