A level of honesty

Some quotes from the HP MacBook Pro Envy’s design video (Hat tip to Matt Legend Gemmell):


Stacy Wolff — Director of Design for HP Personal Systems Group

A level of honesty (that) was really a key goal. The materials that we used were really true to this core attribute of honesty.

And talking about a red stripe around the Envy’s keyboard.

We brought Beats Audio into the Envy landscape. We wanted to visualise the audio. We wanted to go beyond just the sense or the audible sound of Beats with Envy.

Kevin Massoro — Manager, Consumer Industrial Design Team

You’ll notice on the product that we integrated a volume wheel that has what I call “interaction gravity”. Interaction gravity is what pulls people into the product to, interact with it.

(Notice Kevin Massoro’s expression at 03:35 as he talks about interaction gravity. Priceless.)

It allows the user finite control of audio.

I love that part, but I think he meant either ‘fine’ or ‘infinite’

Now I appreciate that videos like this — including the ones that Apple makes — are commercials, but do you know one designer who speaks this type of corporate marketing nonsense? I’ll guess the answer’s no.

To paraphrase Matt Legend Gemmel, from his post on copycat design.

If you [Copy someone else’s solution because it’s popular, and easier for you] then guess what: you just made your life harder. You’ve inherited all of the constraints that already existed, and you added more. Constraints like credibility, not just for your company but more importantly for yourself as a professional. I feel terribly sorry for the designers in the HP Envy design video, skirting around the Apple-shaped elephant in the room.

Matt could have gone further, to honesty. The problem with the HP Envy, or any number of phones, tablets or notebooks, isn’t that they’re clones of Apple products, but that they lack honesty.

The trouble is that honesty isn’t something you can design in. It is’t a feature you can incorporate like a volume knob. Honesty goes to the very heart of why we make something, not just how we make it.


 
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