“Everything in nature is the way it is by design; evolution has no aesthetic or personal opinion. Like art, some people find bugs to be quite beautiful while others cringe at the sight of them. But like them or not, their design is the way it is because of their environment and the obstacles they face trying to survive. In other words, it doesn’t matter what you think; it has to work, or they die.”
- Eric Fisher

Here’s a link to an excellent article about design, but more specifically about user experience design. It explains the difference between art and design, sometimes not very clear since the lines are continually blurred by both artists and designers. But the central tenet behind this article suggests something that I’ve been ruminating on for quite a while. It explains that the discipline of user experience design at its core is objective, not subjective. So I’ll add to this idea by making some basic distinctions. Yes, graphic design must be very artful and aesthetic, and I would venture to say that it’s probably the most artistically free expression of design along with motion graphics, where the only goal is to communicate and suggest an emotional response. But once you venture into architecture, product design, industrial design, application design, and web design, the stakes get higher. The goal is no longer limited to communication, but to guiding the action of the user. User design adds an additional layer of complexity to the work of design, and of course it must have an aesthetic appeal for it to work effectively.

But getting back to the issue at hand, designing objectively is very hard if you don’t know what your aim is, who the users are, or what your context is. This is why psychology, cognition, learned experience, and environment are such important points to explore when designing for successful user experience. As explained in the article there may be different routes to going about the same task. But if you design with the simplest and most efficient goal in mind, you save the users a lot of confusion. That’s Occam’s Razor at it’s finest. And nowadays the success of a product depends on it’s ease of use, which means intuitiveness. If you placed the button right where the user would have looked for it initially you’re on the right track. In order to know this you must get in your user’s head. And getting in people’s mind is no easy task. User design utilizes relevant and logical steps to guide experience. Art and aesthetic appeal don’t have a strict need for efficiency and logic. Although user experience design and graphic design are related, their aims are different. But both must work in conjunction for an experience (be it web, software, product, environment) to be completely effective.