Don’t listen to Le Corbusier—or Jakob Nielsen : Cheerful
Cheerful software, above all, honors the truth about humanity:
Humans are not rational beings.
A human is a walking sack of squishy meat and liquids, awash in chemicals
This is a concept that I've found myself subscribing to more and more lately. The point is developers and even a lot of designers are so focused on what can be measured quantitatively and prescribed in a recipe-like set of standards, they forget that they're supposed to be designing their interfaces for humans, not spec-sheets and overly-analytical requirements documents. Trying to rationalize the inherently irrational will not only frustrate ourselves, but the humans that are our users.
Follow the link above for the full message.
After I shared the link with some peers, I got a terse response, "Form follows function." However, the near religious following of that mantra is why we have so many highly "functional" websites with no soul. They're just data and link dumps that fail to make any positive emotional connection with the user.
