Nathan Bowers recently posted an ‘I think it sucks‘-rant against the new delicious.com re-design, and it got me thinking about the lack of constructive design criticism on the web. While criticism in any form is a notoriously difficult dialogue to establish, I know it doesn’t look like this.

There are many arguments and claims in Nathan’s article that I don’t think are correct or clearly explained, but it’s best to start with what he does get right. He gives a pretty solid list of basic UI design principles, the general thrust of which is “make things big, clear, distinct, and obviously related.” It’s sound advice, and something that I’d imagine just about any UI designer would agree with in the abstract.

Yet he’s hung up on subjective issues — when he points out that the font size is just too small, it’s as if there’s an absolute size for screen readable text, in all contexts. There isn’t. In an interface, you’re using the difference in font sizes to help establish a visual hierarchy of what’s most important (larger) to what’s less (smaller). In the new Delicious design, the links are still quite large, nearly 3 point sizes larger than the tag links on the right. They’re also different colors, further separating them in the hierarchy.

His other beef is that things are just “too tight” and that there’s “not enough whitespace.” I’d agree that there are areas in the interface that could use a touch more padding and separation (the tag search input box), but there’s a limit to how much whitespace any UI can take before it hampers usability (by decreasing the number of items you can view on a screen). The issue of just how much whitespace to use is a matter of preference — some users enjoy smaller fonts (they can read more), others’ have poor vision and want things larger. Many users find a too-padded UI distracting, again preferring a more compact and powerful layout. You can’t please everybody, and Delicious picked a medium ground that satisfies the core issues of usability, while not alienating the majority of their users (Bowers excepted, most write ups of the new design suggest that many users like the new look and features).

You work for the man, man

What gets me most about this piece is the utter lack of charity for those who designed it. Bowers claims that “if you’ve got a team of designers, QA people, and usability engineers, and you screw up something I rely on, the gloves come off.” Oh, do they? He prefaces this with the note that he normally goes soft on “anyone doing the best they can with limited time and budget.” Hmmm.

Is there a company, anywhere, that doesn’t have these same constraints? Doesn’t Delicious exist in one of the most competitive industries in the world? Didn’t they have to do good work, and fight off dozens of well-funded competitors? Writing a completely uncharitable piece (he mentions only a single positive note in the entire piece) and taking a shot at the design team for the supposed crime of working for a large company just isn’t professional.

Hulk smash!

And this — my frustration with posts like this — is the whole problem. Writing negative missives doesn’t help us talk about the design details in a constructive way. Because it’s nearly all negative, I can’t really address any single part of the post, without addressing the whole. Writing in the absolute voice just fans the flames of opinion, and makes the discussion a binary choice between “Right on, that sucks!” or “I think you’re flat out wrong.”

I respect Nathan as a designer — his work is wonderful — and I’m glad he took the time to point out, in detail, his issues with a tool he obviously likes and uses. Let’s just all try to aim a bit higher with our criticism, and try to keep the dialogues as open, friendly, and thoughtful as possible.