"I agree, but that's so broad. People specialize in medicine and law, the same is true with design."

"Sure, there are people who are better at interaction than visual than industrial, but people over-emphasize the boundaries."

"I disagree. I wouldn't get a watercolorist to paint my house. I wouldn't get an interaction designer to be my architect."

"No one's saying that. I'm just saying you can't only know one. Interaction design *requires* visual design skills also."

"Ok, but between a plain-looking product that works, or a beautiful but annoying site, give me plain and functional any day."

"Give me both."

"No, I'm saying if you *had* to pick one. Are you saying you'd pick the pretty but annoying one?"

"I'm saying it's a false choice. You can have both."

"Maybe you can, but it's rare. Designs fall on one side or another, and it takes special talent to strike the balance right in the middle. I'd say over 80% leans one way or another. Facebook and Quora are functional and plain. Most designer portfolio sites make a better first impression and completely wet the bed when it comes to actually using it. Horizontal scrollbars because they can. A mobile site that only uses Flash. One meg of content so it takes forever to download. Sub-pages that link out to PDFs. (restaurant sites do this too) Mystery meat navigation. Too clever layout. Embedded fonts that actually look pretty crappy in almost every browser. Print techniques that just don't translate to the web, like all columns of text needing to be exactly the same height."

"Right, those are bad designers."

"But they get away with it because the sites are visually impressive. People think they're good designers, but they're not. Not for the medium. Which is why I think there's a difference between fantastic print design and fantastic web design, or industrial design, or city planning, or enterprise software design. One doesn't necessarily translate to the other - in fact thinking it can is half the problem."

"Ok. But I'm saying that a strong visual design *is* part of strong interaction design. Creating an strong, resonant, emotional experience requires a blend of things working in concert."

"Do you think Facebook is an emotional experience?"

"It's pretty bad."

"Maybe so. I've seen a ton of mockups that I like more than Official Facebook. But I still think the experience is emotional. Because your content is there."

"That's the easy part. They've only barely met the bar, but it's not strong design."

"I disagree it's easy. It took a vision to say instead of a MySpace-type cluttered design, the site should be ultra-simple visually, to allow the content to rise to the top. It reminds me of Flickr, which I love. Even though it looks plain at first glance."

"The focus is nice, but even with a focused design, there are degrees of quality. Facebook is on the low end."

"Ok, but they're almost at a billion people, they're profitable, and it's one of the stickiest sites on the internet. So something is going right."

"I think the site succeeds despite the design, not because of it."

"Maybe. But the biggest competitors before it were much more cluttered - I think there was was something freeing about a plain design that wasn't trying to do too much. I think Facebook succeeded partially because it was so boring."

"I'm not saying it needed to be fancy, just that the design is not very high quality."

"My thing is when you say 'high quality', I try to imagine what you mean ... and I think of horribly slow, overly confusing, and straight up bad interaction design ... with a really fancy glossy paint job. I've seen thousands of these sites, and none of them has ever been as easy to use as CraigsList, Quora, or Facebook."

"You like CraigsList now?"

"I hate it. But every competitor I've tried is more pretty and yet less satisfying of an experience."

"Well, all I'm saying is you can have both."

"And I'm saying it's rare."

"I disagree."

"You're dumb."

"No you are."

"Let's get lunch."