Comments on: Jakob Nielsen: ‘Evil’ design

By: Bad profits at fulminate // Architectures of Control

Bad profits at fulminate // Architectures of Control — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:58:09 +0000

[...] Maybe ‘good profits’ and ‘bad profits’ are too simplistic as terminologies, much like Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Evil design’ comments, but even a continuum between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ profit intentions is a useful way of thinking about the merits or otherwise of corporate strategies, particularly with customer service, products, pricing, rent-seeking, gouging, lock-in and so on. [...]

By: links for 2006-10-10 at willkoca

links for 2006-10-10 at willkoca — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:30:07 +0000

[...] Architectures of Control in Design » Jakob Nielsen: ‘Evil’ design (tags: design usability) [...]

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 07:33:37 +0000

Thanks Andy, that’s an interesting example. It seems like with pedestrian-obstructing schemes it’s often done for aesthetic reasons rather than to reduce people’s speed (as with traffic calming, etc).

It always amuses me to see the ‘natural’ paths muddily worn across an area of green space, compared with the often rectilinear or, as you say, oddly counter-curved paths that have been laid.

Similarly to looking for patterns of dead flies on a car front end as a natural way to judge the relative drag coefficient of different design features, looking at the shortcuts people (and animals) will take if unrestricted perhaps ought to be more widely appreciated as a way of designing environments to work with their users, rather than against them.

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:18:08 +0000

When I first read “Evil Design” I thought of a pet peeve of mine I encountered again today — obstructive landscape design. In a public space such as a university or a park, people traveling the same path every day will want to take the shortest path, even if that means straying off the paved walkway. At my university, that meant chaining off and/or planting hedges near the corners of buildings, so pedestrians would have to make square corners, rather than taking a naturally curved (and more direct) path around the corner.

It seems the alternative, making paths that follow where people want to go, is unthinkable. Today I walked through a newly created park and while gentle curves exist in the pathways there, many of them curve in the opposite direction of the natural path through the park.