Few weeks ago, Adobe released a new software, in beta version, called Muse (code name). It's a try to create a web design software for designers who are allergic to code, either it is HTML, CSS or Javascript. No need to code, a beautiful layout can be produced the way designers are used to create some for print in InDesign.

 

So I decided to try it, and what is the best way to do it : create a new website. So I decided to design my website once more (I was already working on a new version with Ricardo Garcia Sanchez, the web developer I work with).

 

Once mock-ups were done, I launched Muse and I started to see if I could reproduce those and the UX ideas I had in mind. Of course, I also played a bit with what Muse offers to see how the software works.

 

 

A BETA IS A BETA

 

Of course, Muse is in beta stage, so it's full of bugs. Beta 2 and then Beta 3 fixed some and brought many more.

 

On the paper, and if one looks at the video tutorials, Muse is great, you can easily create pages with nice "modern" possibilities  (QED : shiny useless stuff clients love) as accordion, slideshow, lightbox and so on. Integration with other Adobe softwares is there (you can import .PSD, Muse turns them into the proper image format, original can be edited directly from Muse) and you can even paste code to put IFrames in your pages (the FB fans are blessed). So when I started to use the software, I was  hoping that I might find a real use to such tool.

 

I am a graphic designer, I don't like code. I work with people who know this better than I could ever do. I know the possibilities (even if  the web dev I work with always tells me that "everything is possible"), I work closely with my dev and everything is running smoothly. Perfect. Why learning to do a thing I don't like ?

 

So I tried Muse. I never thought it would allow me to get rid of web developer but I hoped it could offer me things that might help me in my job. To be honest, I found some but most of all, Muse is disappoiting.

 

The first struggle was software bugs. It's a beta so it's normal, but some are so... annoying. You create a div, solid color, you pick a X, a Y, you preview... the div is dancing on your screen as she was able to decide that the position you choosed was not the right one for your design (this bug is still in the Beta 3). Once you need to make it shorter that it fits the exact space you want to, sometimes you need to move it from one pixel to the left, sometimes you can try whatever you want, the only solution is to close Muse and relaunch. Highly irritating as one can expect such basic things, setting up a position on a page, should be the first thing Muse does perfectly. But no... (to be really honnest, it's a bug happenning when you define DIVs inside widgets. Putting just a div on a page works fine)

 

Other bugs annoyed me, but that's what the beta is for, testing, reporting, waiting fixes, testing again.

 

Anyway, some of those bugs are a real pain and shouldn't be there for a public beta.

 

 

UI IN ALPHA

 

So bugs are here, it's normal, annoying, it's life. But what the hell with the UI ?!

 

I think it became the most annoying thing in Muse 5 minutes after I started to use it. Bugs looked so lovely compared to the software UI.

 

It's slow, messy, hidden features everywhere, and do not try to put widgets into widgets, it's the beginning of the end !

 

It's really irratating, slowing down so much the work. Do not remove fill from a div before you've placed everything you need in, otherwise you will realize how bad you are at pointing and clicking. When you're used to Ps, Ai or Id interface, Muse is really tiring to use. And when the main communication on the Beta launch was "InDesign for web design", it's scary. Adobe must have used the UI alpha version...

 

UI is not intuitive, it is not precise and sharp, pannels are unstackable (I have two screens, I want to be able to put pannels on my second screen and to split them as I want) and it misses basics but essential features. Layers were requested day one of the Beta (I agree that it's not as easy as in other softwares but well, no layers of any kind is a shame).

 

To sum up, the UI needs love and I am not sure it is planed for a near future.

 

 

SO WHAT MUSE IS GOOD AT ?

 

So Muse is not perfect, again it is normal. It is furstrating but I am sure Adobe teams will fix all these little annoyances. I got used of the bugs and the UI but in the end, what can we do with this software ?

 

Well, not a lot... sadly.

 

Muse is not for designers, professional ones. It won't allow you to produce the website you exactly want (but who expected this).

 

A designer is a person who is obsessed with details and perfection. A designer wants to create the exact idea he has in mind. Not something resembling it.

 

Muse is not able to offer what people look for. It won't allow you to produce a today standards website. No CMS support, no @fontface, no multicolumn text (thanks IE). You can't offer such solution to your clients. It wouldn't be professional. They would rely on you for every modifications they need and you would have to produce the whole site each time (you can't import existing HTML files in Muse. So you have to modify the existing Muse file, export it again to HTML, upload to server and so on).

 

Muse in its current state brings web design 10 years ago ! Technically and visually.

 

Just have a look at sites done with Muse (only with Muse, I am not talking about the few Muse showcase websites which were reworked outside of Muse). Most of the time it's bad design. One will say that it's because they were made by non professional designers and not because of Muse. Yes, it's true and that's why Muse is not for professionals. Currently, Muse is too limited for professionals to produce live version of websites.

 

Muse is a good tool to create website wireframing, website map, to do dirty website prototype, to ask client's validation on navigation, page and components behaviour, to check UX design. But to create a website : NO.

 

Right now, no web developer will accept to look at Muse generated pages HTML/CSS . The code is a mess. So it won't speed up the production process because it would be faster to rewrite the whole code than to clean Muse one.

 

It can help but not as people understood it from Adobe.

 

You can't make a real website.

 

 

SO, IN THE END ?

 

I will use Muse, during the beta, then I will see. I will do website wireframing, map and prototype for my web developer. He won't use the code but he will be able to see easily how I want the site to work. I will use it to do quick prototype that clients validate my UX design, or just that I can see if my design choices do not create problems I didn't think of.

 

And...

 

I will exactly do the opposite of what I am saying here, just to prove me wrong if I am. The website you're surfing right now is made with Muse (look at the ugly code). I will try to maintain it and to see if I am right or wrong about the opinion I have on this product. I won't modify the files outside of Muse (except for the JPG Muse generates, they are so compressed...). Maybe, in few weeks or months, I will think that Muse is the perfect software but... I doubt it.

I don't know if it's because of Muse and the web design time travel this software creates but I am in patterns these days. Patterns is part of art history. Usually, people look at it as a simple and effective way to decorate and fill space. It was like this in the early days of web design when patterns were used to fill the web page background and to decorate it (is emptyness really so agonizing ?). Nowadays, patterns in web design is not so common anymore. CSS allows to do complex designs. The reason patterns were used is no longer there.

 

Anyway, patterns can decorate but patterns can create meaning too.

 

I don't really know why but I decided to create some and to try to do it every day. So I took the swiss flag, with the greek cross and the swiss red (255,0,0 - Pantone 485 - C 0, M 100, Y 100, K 0) as my basic pattern unit. I will see what I can create from it and I will post some of the results here.

 

Here are the first ones :

Using Muse to do and maintain this website, I look everyday to the community forum to see how people use it, what they are looking for, what they hope from this software.

 

I also look at reviews about Muse from web developers and designers. It's no surpise to see that professionals are not welcoming this new Adobe software. I can understand it.

 

You can have a look here for a sample of it (it's funny to see how this community reacted the same way to Edge, another Adobe beta product released few weeks before Muse).

 

Right now, what I understand reading all these blogs is that professionals never agree on what our job is, simply because they don't have the same goals.

 

Some are saying that Muse will hurt the profession, some that it's bad, some that it's really really bad. I think one could find some ready to burn Adobe CEO for creating this product.

 

I think the most peculiar thing about it is that (from what I read, I can't have a bigger picture of this than my eyes can offer) the ones who really hate Muse are not part, most of the time, of the product's targeted audience. So, it sounds pretty normal that they don't like it. Most of them are developers and I understand that Muse is their nightmare, not because they will lose their job, hand coding will never disappear as it's far superior to any automated coding process, but because Muse is treating the code as Mc Donald does with the food. Code is the most important thing for a developer so it's easy to understand their reaction. But a website is not just code lines. Code is essential but if it was all, everybody would design websites as Richard Stallman's one (which could be a design posture).

 

A website is much more than HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. It's an experience.

 

 

WEB DESIGN IS NOT PRINT DESIGN

 

Another reason people are decrying Muse is that web design is not the same thing as print design. It's right. They are two different creative processes, each one with its own constraints. People are attacking Adobe on it because the company marketed Muse as an InDesign for web. They are saying that Adobe does not understand what web design is. It could be true but...

 

I dont think Adobe ever planed that designers would design with Muse as they do for a print document. Adobe wants to create a software that allows people to produce web sites without coding, not that they reproduce a print design on the web. Bad designers are already creating bad designed websites, because they are bad or because they are not aware of what the web is, what the screen space is and so on. Muse is not creating this ignorance, it already exists ! And what about developers ? I have met so many web developers who do only what they know, project after project, and sometimes what they know is bad coding.

 

 

KNOWING TO CODE

 

Another complaint, related to the last one above, is that Muse-like products are bad because you don't learn how a website is working and that it is the basics of web design. It's true, you don't learn to code, but code is not web design ! It's just part of it. I do not code but I work closely with web developers. I know what is difficult to do, what problems can occure if I make a specific design choice, what choices I have to avoid to meet my client's needs. But I don't know how to code those things. It's someone else's job. Mine is to design. Some people do both, some do it very well, some do both very bad. There is not only one way to do web design.

 

I think the most funny complaint related to it is that Muse forced to have fixed width websites. The vast majority of websites nowadays have fixed width because it's easier to do and to control ! It's also less expensive as you don't have to check that the design is consistent with different screen resolutions. Less time, smaller cost.

 

This sounds like some developers see the code as a way to get rid of ignorant designers. Perhaps, they think that Muse (or other WYSIWYG softwares) are seen by designers as a way of getting rid of "ignorant" developers. Well, having such a vision is really sad.

 

 

GOOD WEB DESIGN

 

In the end, the most important question is : will Muse allow us to do better web design (web design as designing and coding) ? Better coding... hm, no. But better designing process, I think it could.

 

Some people are handling the whole web design process alone, some do good job, some do bad one. Being able to do everything to create a website is not the solution. Most of the time, there are many professions involved to produce a website. Graphic designers, UX designers, integrators, web developers, SEO specialists, social media specialists, marketing specialists and many more. The most important is good communication between these people. Of course, each one of them need to be good at what he's doing and it's even better when he knows what the other do and what their work is about.

 

A designer should communicate with a web developer at the early stages of a project. Creating mock-ups, getting the client's approval and then sending the design to the developer is bad. A developer should have some design knowledge too, to better understand what a designer is doing. The most important is that the client gets an effective website (effective design AND effective code) that meets his business requirements and that the end user has the expected experience when he visits the website.

 

I am sure Muse will offer to me, and to many other designers, a way to have a better understanding with developers and clients. I will never use Muse (as it is now, I don't know what it will be in 10 years) to produce a website for a client but it's a good solution (once it will be polished and that some missing features will be introduced) to produce prototypes, to validate design ideas, to find design flows which were not visible on a static mock-ups.

Responsive design ! It looks like it's the trendy term these days. Apart from the fact the term is pretty bad to name what this design  process is (I am still waiting for a reaction from a website...), as you can read here and here, It is becoming the thing that makes a design good or bad.

 

To sum up, it's the capacity for a web design to adapt to screen resolution. You build only one site for all devices, the page is resized to fit the screen, text colomns, pictures, menus, everything move to adapt to the screen space provided by the device. It's a bit like the Graal for web designers and web agency. One website to build, one website to maintain and it works on every device. Perfect ! One website to rule them all !

 

It's so wonderfull that you can find around the web many web designers, web developers or web whatever telling you that it's a revolution and that you have to adopt this new way of designing websites. Professionals who still do a desktop website and a mobile version of it are just has-beens !

 

 

SO WHY IS IT SO GREAT ?

 

Sure, being able to design a website once and its design stays consistent on every device is great. I won't list all the positive things about this "responsive" design. But clearly, for a web agency,  the gain is about time, so money and so client's satisfaction. You don't have to develop several versions of a website, you don't have to maintain all of them and you can tell your client "Yes ! Your website will work on all devices and stay the same site !". Everybody is happy. You put some Wow effect when you present the website to your client. The world is becoming better. Or not...

 

Anyway, positive things about this way to design exist and I let you google to find some articles about it. But is "responsive" design so great ? Well, as some people starting to express it, I don't think so.

 

 

SOME "NOT SO HAPPY" VOICES ABOUT IT

 

Last months, some voices have raised to say "Hey ! Stop telling bullshit with your not-really-responsive design". I agree with some, I don't with others, but in the end, it's good to read people who don't think mainstream.

 

Before explaining why I think it's not as great as many say, I will point to articles where some people express their critical view about it.

 

The first one that comes to my mind is this article from Webdesignshock.com. It mostly focuses on technical datas showing how many drawbacks "responsive" design can create. Connection speed, downloaded datas that a mobile device doesn't need are some of the reasons given by the author. I advice you to read it, it's pretty interesting. At the end, it covers some reasons I see as the main problems, as a web designer.

 

Another interesting article, close to the one above but this time in french, covers also technical problems due to "responsive" design. What I like about this one is that the author stresses that it might not be a way to go faster and for a smaller cost than usual web design approach.

 

The last article I want to link here, which gave me the desire to write down my thoughts on "responsive" design, talks more about design than technology. The author's arguments are not so great as some of the comments point it. I think it's more related to the way he expressed them than to their validity. To sum up, he claims that "responsive" design is boring, producing boring websites. He doesn't really go into details about it but this article is a good start to think about "responsive" design consequence.

 

 

EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING ?

 

What I dislike in the way this design process is presented is that it assumes that a website, no matter which device it is displayed on, must be the same experience. It also assumes that its appearance is fitting to any device. Last but not least, it assumes that the user will look for the same content on every device. It's like assuming a book and a movie telling the same story should be identical. No they don't have too, they're two different experiences. Right now, a "responsive design" website is like a movie. It fits to theatre screens, to TV ones or to computer screens. It's the same content, same visual, adapting to the screen size, assuming that, no matter what the display is, it should tell the exact same story in the exact same way. What a pity !

 

Using a desktop to surf the web, a smartphone or a tablet, is not the same experience. People are not looking for the same content, "the same story", when they're using one of these devices. What is the interest to browse a photo gallery with high resolution pictures on a smartphone ? Some features as geolocalisation fit perfectly well with mobile devices, but on a desktop, what is the use of it ? As  shown in the first article I linked here (9. "Great mobile products are created, never ported"), the user does not look for the same experience on every device. The author is talking about another article explaining it. As a web designer, I've worked for a company which does hybrid mail. They have a website for this service. They developed a smartphone website which is a different experience. Their clients do not plan to do their hybrid mail via iPhone, but using their smartphone to follow their order is probably a good use for such device.

 

Everything is not everything ! Looking at "responsive" design as it is today (its prehistory), as it would provide a perfect answer to cross-device compatibilty, is looking at it with one eye closed and to forget the main important thing : each device has its own use, so its own content and its own way to display it. Sure, it's easier to reproduce the exact same thing everywhere, but it's such a waste.

 

 

AND THEY SAY FIXED WIDTH IS PRINT DESIGN

 

As I mentioned in Muse round 2 post, fixed width design is looked bad by some people. Surely because it's not trendy. One of the reason for looking at it this way is that it would be designing for web as one designs for print. Papers, magazines have a fixed width (they are made of  material which is pretty obvious they have fixed dimensions), so fixed width in web design would turn it into a print design, so a bad design. First, fixed width is not bad design, it's a design choice to have more control. Some use it, some don't, everybody works the way he likes. "Responsive" design would be the solution to kill this web design aberration that fixed width is ! It would  get out the web design from the print design rules, freeing the whole digital world potential ! What a joke...

 

One of the digital world basic space fundamentals is : there is no boundaries. The screen is the communication display allowing us to interact with the digital world. It's a window on a different world, but this one is much broader than the window. Why do we have to accept that the digital world we're creating must fit to the screen boundaries ? Who decided so ? Does one have to die if goes beyond the boundaries ? 99.99% of websites do not take into account this thing. Digital space is infinite. Of course, web developers and designers quickly realized that there might be some space and content outside the screen... but only vertically. Something coming from technical constraints about how text could be displayed. "Responsive" design keeps us in this way of thinking. The digital world is the screen size, except vertically where this world can exceed the screen space. So we have to stay in this boundaries. The "beauty" of "responsive" design is to keep us inbetween them without thinking about it (and no, I refute every "it's better design" thingy one could say. It's having mind and creativity as tight as the screen boundaries). Fixed width is a reminder to our poor and disappointing creativity, and when something reminds you of your own weakness, if you can make it disappear, you do it. And so pretends "responsive" design.

 

I see it, the way it is used nowadays, as a way to restrict screens resolution as shit of paper. There are the A6, A5, A4, A3 papers, the B1, B2, B3, B4 ones, the C8, C9, C10 ones as there are desktop 4:3 screens, desktop 16:10 screens, smartphone tiny little screens, tablet screens. The most important is to fit to those boundaries with the exact same experience. This is "responsive" design. This is level zero creativity. This is boring as Jonathan Longnecker says in his article. I woudln't say it's bad web design but surely it's the easier. It is surely becoming the standard of web design as it looks easier and more cost effective. I love one comment from Jonathan Longnecker's article which sums up everything :

 

"Designing something that's going to go on a 27" monitor based on the requirements of a mobile phone doesn't sound very responsive to me."

 

To fulfill a specific matter that is just the flavor of the month, we accept to renounce to a lot of wonderful things that would make the web experience unique for users and companies. Holding the banner of creativity, "responsive" design is narrowing it to its most simple expression.

It's funny to see how life brings you what you are looking for. I wrote this short paper four days ago about responsive design and how bad the buzz about it was. Then, this week-end, I had a family meeting and some of the thoughts I had written down in this article were right in front of me.

 

At the end of the lunch, some family members got their mobile devices out and started playing with them. 2 iPads and 3 iPhone. They started to talk about how they use those devices. One of them is a project manager, one is in finance, another is working for a huge tobacco company and the last two ones are retired bankers.

 

During their talk about how they use their mobile devices, it became obvious none of them has the same use of such device. The one working in finance uses it mostly for work, using his tablets to write down notes and so on. He still uses his desktop computer. One of the retired bankers seems to use his iPhone to look for news and I guess for stock prices (he was looking at Rugby World Cup results) and I am not sure he uses a desktop computer a lot. The one working for tobacco company uses her iPhone for emails but mostly for social medias (mainly Facebook, checking every ten minutes new status on her page). She doesn't use a desktop computer anymore. The project manager uses iPhone and iPad to surf the web, get information as she's moving but she still spends more time on her desktop computer. The last retired banker didn't talk a lot about how he uses his iPad but he was browsing the news.

 

All of them look for different informations on their mobile devices and use them for different things. They don't want the same experience as on a desktop display and they don't want the same experience as the other family members.

 

 

SOME MORE INFORMATIONS AND LINKS

 

Then this morning, the project manager linked on her Google+ page this article. It's about a study on how users use their tablet (USA users). It's a little bit distorted as it was mainly focusing on news content, but anyway it's interesting.

 

Apart from showing different kinds of use, the study stresses points that I find very interesting :

 

1 - "The only activity that people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the web generally (67%)".

 

2 - "Whether people will pay for content, though, still appears to be a challenge, even on the tablet. Just 14% of these tablet news users have paid directly for news content on their tablets. Another 23%, though, have a subscription to a print newspaper or magazine that they say includes digital access."

 

I won't do a in-depth analysis of it, it's not my job and I don't have the right skills to do it, but it's interesting to see that browsing the Web to get news is something a lot of users do and very few users are willing to pay to get news (which means using an app). Would the reason of it be that most news websites content is free so browsing cost nothing and people got used to get news for free on their desktop computer? So surfing the Web as the main activity on a tablet wouldn't be device related but just a matter of cost.

 

Another interesting thing in this study is that "a third (33%) of tablet news users say they are turning to new sources for news on their tablet, sources they had not turned to on other platforms such as television or their desktop computer". I could speculate that it is stressing users are looking for a different experience than the one they get on their desktop or other devices. They don't want to replace their desktop experience, they want more and different experiences with their mobile devices.

 

Last interesting thing is that "tablet news users also say they now prefer their new devices over traditional computers, print publications or television as a way both to get quick news headlines and to read long-form pieces". Tablets offer the easiest and fastest way for them to get want they want, the content they're looking for.

 

All of this is not directly related to web design, being "responsive" one or not. It's about usability, habits (free content vs pay for content) and I think the fact that no matter where they are, they can access what they want. "Responsive" design could be an answer for some of those users that they get the experience they want but there are so many different ways to use those devices that claiming "responsive" design is THE solution wouldn't be correct. Each company needs to identify what their customers are looking for on their mobile devices and see if "responsive" design is the right solution. The only sure thing is that free content is the right solution.

 

About this, I found another interesting (but short) article. I won't talk of it in depth, you can read it, but I will just sum it up with this quote :

 

"Responsive design won’t work in every situation, but it is a technique you should use where appropriate".

 

The author stresses the fact, that responsive or not, the main focus is to make the content accessible to all. It's the most important thing, the users must still access content from any device. It means that it could be just a "responsive" design website or a mobile version of the website. User must get content !

 

Then, to get a content that fits the device and the users' needs is a designer problem. The designer must be responsive, the design must be good and the user happy.

a-Pixl Stuff is a kind of blog. I use it to talk about things related to my job or to publish special works which don't fit to a-Pixl website.

 

There is no comment feature, no social medias forward buttons, and it's a deliberate choice.

 

if you want to comment anything published here or that you have questions, feel free to contact me via email.

 

I might post it if I find it interesting.

 

lgitton@a-pixl.fr

PATTERNS SWISS FLAG

BEHANCE NETWORK

FUBIZ

@ISSUE

NETMAGAZINE.COM

MEDIANES FACEBOOK PAGE

THE AUTUMN SOCIETY

FWA

MOODBOARD

BEWAREMAG

SPOKE ART

BUTDOESITFLOAT.COM