Software is not sexy!
sexy: (adj) marked by or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest
I have never seen or used a software application that in and of itself aroused my sexual desire. Combo boxes, regardless of how nicely they are done, are not sexy. Fancy charts and graphs do not turn me on. And I can assure you I have never fantasized about buttons (regardless of how big they are).
So those of you in marketing, please stop asking me to make software applications sexy! I can’t.
It’s true, some products are thought of as sexy. They may exhibit visual cues that resemble those of humans, they may have some relationship to sex itself, they may satisfy a particular fetish, or they may be associated with power and wealth. It’s not completely unreasonable to deem these products “sexy”.
But, Facebook is not sexy. Google is not sexy. Enterprise software? Not sexy. Beautiful, well designed, exciting, fun to use, yes. Sexy no.
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Tweets that mention Software is not sexy! | User Interface Trends -- Topsy.com
Jul 12, 2010
1:49 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Russell Wilson and Russell Wilson. Russell Wilson said: New post: Software is not sexy! (http://bit.ly/dvW6u9) http://bit.ly/dvW6u9 #sexy_software [...]
Alexander
Jul 13, 2010
12:53 am
Fun observation. :)
It’s just that some software looks and feels so good that ‘great’ just doesn’t feel like a word strong enough to describe how much you like the thing.
http://sexy.urbanup.com/1380228
Sjors
Jul 13, 2010
3:23 am
I think you should try harder :)
Beautiful however might already be hard enough; good read on the topic: http://www.cennydd.co.uk/2010/beauty-in-web-design-part-1/
Allan
Jul 13, 2010
7:14 am
So we are on the agile learning curve and looking at user stories (product requirements). We are learning how to train our product manager (and ourselves) to write stories that are specific-enough to implement. After all there is nothing worse than discovering ambiguity too late.
So we are going through the backlog of stories and lo, there it is – a user story that leaps out of the stack: make the GUI sexy. (I’m not making this up)
Now if that doesn’t nail it down, I don’t know what would…
Russell Wilson
Jul 13, 2010
8:05 am
@Allan — awesome! ha ha (have seen the same before)
Allan
Jul 13, 2010
8:08 am
Of course, unlike Russell, I still get a little tingle down my spine when I click a new combo box for the first time. So almost every UI I build is “sexy-out-of-the-box”*.
* Fair notice – I will be applying for a trademark on this.
Brian
Jul 13, 2010
1:51 pm
I think that’s a very narrow definition of sexy. For example, even Merriam-Webster lists one of the definitions of sexy as, “generally attractive or interesting.” I believe this is what they mean when they ask for a website to be sexy. As much as I like cars and motorcycles, thankfully none of them have ever aroused sexual desire or interest.
Yvonnia
Jul 13, 2010
2:31 pm
I’m in MarCom and I literally have my whole department calling EVERYTHING sexy…even press releases! Oops! :)
milan
Jul 14, 2010
5:30 am
“sexy” is a term you always hear from clients and others involved in any kind of design project. I usually tend to ignore that. It doesn’t help at all, not even for a car.
John
Jul 16, 2010
6:39 am
when I hear this term from end users i interprete it. that is, users don’t usualy know what terms to use, or what they even wanted if they knew what ti say.
sexxy gets turned into slick, polished, streamlined workflow, less cluttered.
which turns into the concept of getting the UI out of the way of te user, so the functionality that the user wants they can achive with minimal effort
this is sometimes obvious in some apps, ones that just pack in controls with little to no organization. and add a bunch of extra controls that are usefull indeed but rairly used in the main workflow path.
sometimes it’s more subtle, the users doesn’t know what they want, they just know that the app doesn’t provide them with the info they are looking for, but they have the feeling that “it’s there somewhere” (this is my usage pattern when using Word or Excel, I know it can do X, just have no clue what ‘ribbon’ that’s on.
the other side of alll this is the cheep low hanging fruit. graphics. nobody likes something that looks like a win3.1 app, big square grey button. cheep dropdown boxes, users have an expectation of class, they want the extra fluff of drop shadows and gradient fills.
ofcourse, fluff in most cases will hurt your workflow if you don’t solve the above problem first.
the fluff needs to be consistant, it needs to have some visual que that this is not some completly new dangled thing, just polished up version with bells and whistles of something they are familiar with, they like consistency.
a sexxy sports car is still a car, with a steering wheel (on one side or the other), the seats may be leather but they still work the same. te radio volume can still be adjust even though the controls have been moved to the steering wheel to improve workflow.
a UI can be sexxy, you just have to peal back what the users said and revial what they mean
David | Nuesoft
Aug 10, 2010
11:32 am
you can always try… http://www.nuesoft.com/too-sexy/