Yes. They telegraph consistency, reliability, and deeper thought. The clear relationship that the type and all the icons have to each other looks planned and substantial. Typically, these are qualities that brands want to convey.
Facebook got pretty big and they're just now doing this, and mainly because one guy is spearheading it. I have a hard time believing Facebook's user base or revenue would be any different if they consistently used a certain sans-serif font.
No, these changes are not new. They are years old.
The small changes over time are someone imperceptible in tiny chunks as they become applied over time, this may be true. But to question their value? To the visual design and branding industry, that's like throwing down the gauntlet. There are teams of people dedicated to shaving milliseconds of latency off of page loads. They might speed up the entire site by 15-20ms in a year! That's amazing! But do Facebook users care?
The answer is probably actually "no" -- but it's not important that users notice or care. In fact, these kinds of changes are judged in their success by users actually not noticing and simply getting a better experience whether they know it or not.
> But to question their value? To the visual design and branding industry, that's like throwing down the gauntlet.
I don't see the problem questioning the value. If I'm paying somebody $150k a year to design stuff for my company, and they're spending the time making imperceptible changes to fonts and deciding whether the bottom of the 'f' in my logo should have a 3 pixel border or not, I think it's fair to know why they're doing it and what they're expecting to achieve.
I never said design isn't valuable. I was specifically questioning the trivial changes this guy is making. Is he really earning his salary making imperceptible font changes?
Making a page load faster is actually noticeable by users, but it's a red herring, because that's not a component of "visual identity," and it wasn't even mentioned in the article.
Something more substantial than, "I'm another designer, and I think it's valuable," would be nice.
Discussing font changes: kerning, hinting, ligature adjustments and the like aren't imperceptible. The difference in how well letters group together to form words, and the internal space and connection of those letters, plays as much or more of a difference in other performance and user experience refinement (like, for example, page load sequencing and total loading time stats, as was mentioned earlier).
Extra space around your logo may leave it emotionally "stranded" from other content. Too little may crowd it and make content around it uncomfortable to interact with. Users actually respond to interactions through these sorts of emotions. Your 150k employee's work is attempting to perfect psychological reactions to your tool, in the context of myriad screens/monitors/resolutions/color profiles/design trends/etc.
All of those "trivial changes" combine to give users the perception of completeness, cohesiveness and value.
When broken down into exacting detail, it's easy to dismiss them as imperceptible; by themselves, they mostly are. But the cumulative effect of these decisions leads to the perception of a better product.
Compare and contrast a MacBook Air with any one of the cheaper knock-offs. They may pretty much look the same, but the Apple product has an intangible sense of being worth more.
The same thing goes with cars—sure, they all have the same basic design, but put an Audi next to a Lada and you can immediately tell by looking at them which one's worth more.
In my experience, Apple products offer superior technical value. Compare the touchpad in a MacBook to one of the knock-offs. OSX has better graphics performance and more software available than Linux. The build quality of the Apple products is higher. Point being, there are objective reasons and tangible value that make the MacBook worth its higher cost.
Same thing with the car example.
I'm still not convinced that Facebook is gaining any tangible value from such minor aesthetic changes. Are there any real numbers to back up the claims that real users care about such things?
Your line of questioning is great. And it's something that drives me up the wall that designers don't engage with these questions better. Here's someone from DesignerNews on your comments:
"Here's what the left-brainers have to think about such a well though-out and through design process..."
It's hinging on the effort that went into the process, which is by all means extensive and impressive. Its' defensive. But I think your line of questioning is extremely important and I'm a designer, so I'll give it a bash with explaining why they did this.
I don't think you could ever back up with numbers that these changes 'matter' to users. Any research that could be done would, in the words of someone better than I – be used like a drunk uses a lamp post. For support, not illumination.
At the end of the day, I'm inclined to agree that these changes are negligible for users. What this is more a case of is Facebook deciding they care about the craft and quality of the visual design in their product. Regardless of if users give a toss. The change isn't quantifiable in numbers. It will most likely not change the bottom line of the company.
But what it does do, is communicate that Facebook cares about visual design craft. This is part of branding. Deciding they care about these things, to have the image of the company they want.
These changes are on par with Apple choosing to make a glass staircase in their stores. It's like Twitter choosing the colour of their office furniture, it's like any other company implementing anything that does not directly or clearly affect returns or is quantifiable in numbers. Simply put, it's a culture thing. They've decided they care about visual design craft and so they put money into it so they can have high quality visual design craft. And they have done that here – this is high quality.
Oh man, "the left-brainers"? What happened to "Good design makes a product useful/understandable"? If it does either of those things, the effect would be measurable. I don't have any trouble believing that investing time getting the design right translates into better engagement or sales or whatever metric, and you should be able to hold your work up to the light. Writing off a provocative but genuine line of questioning such as jlarocco's is pretty much relegating yourself to the echo chamber.
Apple's computer products are on par and often mediocre with the last few years of Windows-based computers. Retina is on match from other vendors for less. Many retailers offer price-for-price better performance, better graphics support, as much or more memory.
Apple offers a fantastic tactile experience and OS X -- the user experience ecosystem is the big sell for them, which is why their operating system has been a loss-leader for so long. A similarly priced Dell XPS 13" is going to out-perform a new MacBook pretty much everywhere but battery life (which it misses by something like an hour), but the Apple is the more attractive buy because of OS X and the joy of using it.
It's demonstrated and acknowledged, through profit and market dominance industry-wide, that there's more to life than tech specs, and that more is user experience. There's really little else to say on it...
You''d have thought on Hacker News of all places at least one person would pop up saying that they had AB tested user engagement with consistent and inconsistent variants.
The problem with this conversation is that the purpose of visual design is to elicit a desired emotional response from a viewer, and developers are not typically known for their emotional introspection. In fact emotion typically is counterproductive to engineering work. So, when engineers ask for proof that design is worth it, they are asking for a type of first-order proof that they have spent their professional lives moving away from.
That said, here is an example of a study that illustrates why design matters:
> It takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form a first opinion of your brand once they've perused your company's website, according to researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. And it takes just another 2.6 seconds for that viewer's eyes to concentrate in a way that reinforces that first impression.
....
> Study participants were asked to rate sites on the basis of visual appeal and design factors during an average of 20 seconds spent on each of 25 websites. The sections sparking the most interest included:
> Logos: Visitors spent about 6.48 seconds focused on this most identifiable portion of a site.
This study focuses on the time and direction of attention, but the clear implication is that these items are causing an effect in the opinion of the visitor. The role of visual design is to create the desired effect in the desired visitor. For example a financial management company will want to elicit feelings of trust, safety, wealth, security, etc.
Facebook, I would imagine, would like to elicit feelings of belonging, of family and friends, of connecting and even love. But that is just my guess.
Such things happen below the conscious mind. That might sound woo-woo to an engineer, but it happens to us all in everyday life. We trust some people more easily than others. We prefer one brand of candy over another. Some people like broccoli, some hate it. Etc.
