I hope I get to meet one, two or all of these guys someday. On a recent post at Signal vs. Noise someone calling themselves “The Voice of Reason” took the 37s guys to task for advocating their massively scaled back approach to application development. In the comments, David Heinemeier Hansson said something I’ve been feeling in a way I’ve never been able to put it…

What I believe to be dangerous is the demeaning notion of cogs in a wheel. That just adding more structure and process has a positive effect on the outcome of “the simple man”. I believe that if you treat a designer or a programmer as someone who can’t do right unless they follow A Master Plan, then you’re encouraging to live down to your expectations. Throw reason and creativity out the window in pursuit of instructions.

(Emphasis mine) In any case, its often lately that I’ve felt like a cog in the wheel… and I want out of that. I feel like I’m not allowed to be creative because it might be too much trouble down the line.

Part of being creative and innovating is pushing against constraints. I’m a big believer that constraints on time and resources are a major driver to innovation, but on the other hand, constraints on INNOVATION itself because it might be difficult or require learning new tools and/or techniques does nothing but stop innovation dead in its tracks.

I’m also a big believer in the idea that your technology platform is never an excuse for not doing things the right way. And “the right way” generally means the way that’s best for your users.

Proof that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Andy Rutledge over at UX Magazine has a good rant on why sucky web sites that are successful still suck.

Examples he points to are Google, eBay and Boingboing. I don’t read Boingboing, but I’m a user of both Google and eBay and I can attest that they do both completely suck when it comes to UI.

Google is clean. Yes, we get it. But you could present a lot more information and still keep the search function front and center. Then maybe, just maybe, I’d use something like the Google personalized home page. Problem is, it’s ugly. Try it. It looks circa 1996 crappy-ass web site. GMail isn’t much better. Gmail works cool. But it’s like the Edsel of webmail apps. Sure it runs great, but good lord it’s got a face that looks like it fell outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.

Like he says in the article, Craigslist is well-designed “undesign”. Google is just badly designed. The search results pages are pretty crappy as well. A lot could be done to make the SERPs much more user-friendly. Like not throwing all the info for the result into one gobble-de-gook mess of a paragraph.

eBay is the same way. For all the experimentation they do with their UI, you’d think they’d get it right eventually. But no… And tell me again why I have to LOG IN to get to see completed auctions? Come on… let’s get with the 2.0 guys!

So, let’s stop letting commercial success promote bad design. Just because a sucky web site’s business model doesn’t suck doesn’t mean we should copy them Beavis.

My man Jakob Nielsen has a very interesting take on how the search engines fit into the overall ecosphere of the web.

The answer: They’re the leeches of the web.

I gotta tell you, after I think about it a bit, I can see his point. He illustrates it by explaining a scenario where the search engines (through paid search) can really reap the benefits of improvements in other people’s web sites. As you can afford to pay more for traffic, the bids will rise to compensate and the only one winning is the big G (or Y!, I suppose). Google would say their use of clickthrough and relevance stats in ranking their paid search negates this, but I don’t think it does… at least not long-term.

The bottom line is, the search engines are hurting the content providers on the web. Like I’ve always said, the SE’s and the content providers and merchants need to realize they’re in a symbiotic relationship… and neither would live without the other.

He also makes a good point that organic results are all well and good, but you just can’t rely on them. We’ve seen this firsthand when well-ranked web sites just disappear from the listings. Kinda reminds me of gambling.