Essay on Article Summary Week 5

Submitted By Callie-Newton
Words: 621
Pages: 3

Callie Newton
11416607

Title: How Giant Websites Design For You (and a billion others, too)
Author: Margaret Gould Stewart
Year Published: August 5, 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quJdL9ggETI

Main Idea:
Margaret Gould Stewart is Facebook’s director of product design
This video focuses on website design on a global scale. Design is both an art and a science. One must use big data and intuition to come up with the next big thing. Stewart states that audacity and humility are two factors that are required for design. One needs audacity to believe that the whole world wants what is being created, and humility to realize it is not about you or your portfolio but about the people you are creating something for and their willingness and needs to use that design. She uses the Facebook ‘like’ button as an example and says it needed to be modernized, and the little things mattered to redesign that. The designer spent 280 hours to redesign the ‘like’ button. One might ask why the redesign of that button matters? People view this button 22 billion times a day, and it is seen on 7.5 million websites—that’s why it matters. Many people were reporting embarrassing pictures as spam, but there wasn’t a way to report the picture in order for it to be taken down. Facebook had to use data, research, intuition, and empathy in order to design a way to ask a friend to remove a picture. Data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. “It will help make a good design great, but never a bad design good.”

e. Personal Opinion
I found this video to be interesting because we never think past a new design and how long it takes a designer to create it, and how all of the little things add up. The most challenging thing is to understand whom they are designing for. You have to design for where people are, and not where you are. Designing something for everyone everywhere is very difficult, and allowing yourself to adapt to that concept is also challenging.

f. Additions
Some of the things I would have added would be how Facebook and YouTube protect the privacy of users and how they design the privacy features. I think that is very important to users, and Stewart could