Objectivity, Beauty, and Interface

Part One: The Question and its Importance to Designers

Computer-Human interface design is a functional art; you use and experience an interface in addition to perceiving it. Moreover, you use an interface for a purpose, which is another way of saying it's a kind of tool. It is also, of course, a functional art, and involves the elements of taste, sentiment, and aesthetics any art involves.

The functional aspect of interface design can (arguably) be usefully quantified. The designer might establish as a goal "the smallest number of discrete physical actions by the user to accomplish any goal within the scope of the system". Thus your design is successful when there are no more discrete actions to design away. More to the point for most interface designs today, a software design would be successful when it requires the fewest number of mouse clicks. There are certainly other functional goals a designer might use, and for the purposes of this discussion any will do; the only important thing is that a functional goal in this sense can be quantified, whether it involves a quantity of mouse clicks, a span of time, the total distance traversed by a mouse pointer, or what-have-you.

In mathematics, science, and computer programming, and sometimes in interface design, an approach to a problem that comes close to a quantifiable limit is often described in aesthetic terms as "elegant" or even "beautiful". For example, if your theorem, experiment, code, or design involves the fewest possible terms, the simplest possible explanation, the most compact code, or the lowest number of actions, there's something pleasing about it, at least to other practitioners.

The "artful" aspect of interface design is less easily quantified. The designer's goal might be simply "beauty", or might involve the pleasure that users of the interface will experience. This is based more in a sensory response to a stimulus, which here is the interface -- most especially the sensory aspects of it. Today the sensory aspects of an interface are most commonly visual, sometimes auditory, and only occasionally involve other senses.

The question I'm slowly approaching here has to do with the objectivity of the different aspects of interface design. Something you can count is clearly objective; it doesn't matter what you think about a number; its value remains constant. The aesthetics of an interface, though, is a kind of beauty. Everyone is familiar with the truism "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but it's not entirely clear that this is both a truism and true.

Whether the beauty of an interface can be objectively, universally beautiful is significant for designers, particularly designers whose work is (or might be) distributed worldwide. Establishing design goals that match the needs or wants of a specific group of users may not be easy, but at least represents a problem with a known scope. If the beauty of interface design is objective and knowable, then the scope of a design problem becomes much greater while remaining possible. It would be, for example, possible to create an interface design that is beautiful no matter who the users might be. Alternatively, if the beauty of interface design is inherently subjective, then the designer can set aside such a universal goal and establish a multiplicity of goals: beauty for each definable group of users.