Beautiful design

I am a regular visitor to TED.com. Recently, I ran into an old talk by Dan Norman. He spoke of designs that make people happy to use them or own them. He spoke of the problematic Jaguar that every owner loves. He spoke of the orange juicer he used as a home decoration piece.

The message goes on to explore why the functional capabilities are not the only basis for beautiful design.

I wondered how to extend the sentiment into ERP application design. Paradoxically, the one biggest strength of structured applications is that both processes and applications are centered on functional capability. The complex nature of business processes means that a generalization of commercial applications tend towards the complex. There is a tendency to trade-off intuitive usability.

In contrast, Dan Norman's example of the o's in the Goooooogle search engine is simple, almost unnoticeable to the user and yet delivers the search functionality it wishes to deliver. Beautiful intuitive design.