This rings true for me. I studied product design in school, in a program run by IDEO. David Kelley was my advisor. Yet, working in the web world, I don't call myself a "designer". Why? Because I'm not focused on the visual.
The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.
Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.
It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.
Precisely this. The examples in this article are all examples of innovation UI design, which is just a small, albeit highly visible edge of design.
That being said, startups like Uber, Waze, AirBnB, and Nest have all reached staggering levels of success by re-designing the entire stack of user experience in their respective markets. While the interfaces of these products are generally clean, they're not really the crux of the design innovation. Instead, the critical design innovation is elsewhere, in design of the systems, processes, technologies, and even business models that enable a magical end user experience.
All the training in needfinding, and exploring the problem and solution sound very similar to how business school classes work to me.
And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.
It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.
Sort of off topic: What program was that? And what were some of the most influential/important/essential textbooks/resources/projects available to you? I'd like to piece together a similar curriculum for myself.
If design is about "uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives", then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions (vs aesthetics)?
In the last few years, we seemed to have completely thrown away everything we're learned about UX and essentially made the same mistakes all over again. I don't know what started this trend but it's frustrating.
For example, something as simple as the Google PDF viewer: it took me forever to figure out how to save the file. There are no visual cues whatsoever to tell you how to save the PDF. Maybe it's "cooler" but this is something that you need to figure out to mouse over the bottom right corner and these buttons magically appear. I thought we were done with stupid UX decisions like this back in the 90s.
The same goes for Windows 8. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and I tried using Windows 8 for a good hour, before I gave up. There are too many things that are completely nonsensical and need explanation. It's enough to make me switch away from Windows entirely. How this atrocity could have gone through the entire Microsoft org without getting canned before launch is a testament to how broken that company is.
The opposite is iOS. I really don't like using Mac OS (I wiped off Mac OS from my company Mac laptop and installed Windows 7 on it to be more productive), but iOS can be learned by an infant, I've seen it with my own eyes. That's a testament to great design, because it's so intuitive that someone who wasn't alive 18 months ago can figure out how to use it.
I think iOS used to be as simple as you make it but the new flat design is not. There's plenty of example now of places in apps where one flat thing is not clickable and the flat thing right next to it is. How is that intuitive and discoverable?
Go to Notes. Everything is clickable. Click back to Accounts. Now everything except "Accounts" is clickable. Why? How are you supposed to know? Go to the Phone App, pick a contact, The name shows up with the contact's info. Everything on the screen is clickable except the contact's name? Why? How am I supposed to make the distinction?
I know there are better examples but I just clicked the first 2 built in apps I saw.
Windows 8 is interesting. After reading the engineering blogs it's pretty clear they designed the UI changes based on telemetry data and not listening to real user feedback.
> If Carousel is intended to solve a user problem, neither I nor other potential users seem to be able to figure out what it is.
> users don’t seem to be keen on replacing the main Facebook app
> a sufficiently vague target is harder to miss
The common thread between these products is that they are solutions in search of problems. Great design can't help you find the "problem" to solve faster than any other technique. This is a product/market fit article that just happens to focus on design driven products.
I think that's the entire point of the article. The premise is that designers have been given a seat at the table because of the perception that they have some advanced insight into producing products with market fit and betting on them is more likely to produce a successful product. The author uses these three apps, a sample of design driven products, to show that lauded designers have no better insight than anybody else. Maybe they're only better at making things shiny, not creating valuable products.
Designers are good at refining existing products for mass consumption, it's engineers that come up with new, innovative products that solve real problems. Expecting designers to be good engineers is insulting to both professions.
I was actually discussing this post a few days ago with one of my UI/UX designer friends, and he made an interesting point - On news forums like Hacker News we see a lot of failure stories from engineers and marketers about how and why their product or marketing campaign failed, usually ending with some lesson about product-market fit and understanding your users.
But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"? What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why so few people are using Facebook Paper"?
(I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.)
So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!
Why talk about it and reduce their value in the market place?
I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.
and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty.
For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure.
In the examples (Carousel & Paper) the design isn't coming from the very top. Instead, I suspect the designers were given requirements by non-designer PMs and told to make it look nice. It works about as well as programmers being given requirements by non-programmer PMs and told to make it maintainable.
I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.
The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer, and a great instigator at the top.
In Google's visual redesigns - and I've worked on 3 of them now - the design is coming from the top, or rather Larry (or Marissa before he took over) gives carte blanche to a designer and says "Make search look nice". There are restrictions in terms of what is technologically possible or feasible with the engineering resources at hand (steering a massive product like Search to look different or do something different is not easy), but it's not like PMs hand the requirements over the wall.
I think that the problem is communication itself. Communicating requires creating a shared vision in both the speaker and the listener; when the thing to be communicated is basically emotional (as design is), then reducing this to words necessarily loses information. And it's a low-pass filter: it loses precisely those elements that were daring, unique, and innovative in the original design, because those are the elements that the listener/implementer is least familiar with. Designers try to work around this by using pictures - or even better yet, code - but the problem is that your product is ultimately designed to be an experience, and you can't convey that experience without creating it.
Maybe the critical element isn't who's on the founding team (although having those skillsets covered certainly helps), it's that you can get all of them in a room together and have them each responsible for all of the success of the product. I suspect that a great instigator who goes on eLance and 99designs to contract out the design and programming doesn't do much better than the big company does.
It's hard to imagine Drew not caring about design, or not understanding the things you've mentioned. Dropbox succeeded over other competitors mostly because of its fantastic design and user experience. Is Dropbox simply so large now that it's becoming just another typical big company with dysfunction typical of big companies? If so, that's unfortunate. I wonder if YC could amass some wisdom about how to stave off such problems after companies grow really large.
Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.
Most startups fail; most apps don't succeed to the hopes or expectations of their creators. Just because industry has started taking design seriously doesn't mean we should suddenly expect most startups or apps succeed. And just because Carousel, Paper, Square, Jelly, etc. are well designed, if they fail, that is not a failure of Design itself.
To the extent that the executive-level perception of design's contribution to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't create a perception of wasted resources.
But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an essential focus for businesses.
It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to have some high profile hits.
The issue is that engineering and design converge insofar as measurable, quantitative data is available for a thing. Good UX is created by good instrumentation that allows for rapid testing and analysis of the way people use your interface as well as an unbiased knowledge of the history of UX. It's not exceptionally likely that a random "designer" will have or understand either of these things, and they're worthless if they don't. What's left for the people who call themselves "designers" is really just fashion, and it changes every few years, like all fashions.
Clarke's Third Law, that good technology is indistinguishable from magic, is apropos in almost any discussion that touches on the osmosis between technical staff and laymen. The laypeople have seen Apple's meteoric rise and heard it attributed to "design", so they think they need a "designer". But Apple didn't get where they are just by hiring random designers. They got where they are by building an entire system that was centered around the vociferous pursuit of a few simple principles. Apple is Apple because they've inextricably ingrained these principles into the corporate DNA. Apple is Apple because they know that "vision" is only a minor part in good industrial design, and because everyone in the company is committed to developing products that exceed expectations along all axes, through art, code, analytics, and other major disciplines.
Laypeople see Apple's attitude and success and think they just need to hire another plucky, divisive guy with an artsy feel to replicate it. They don't understand the work. To them, it's all magic, and anyone with a convincing robe and wizard hat is equally competent.
If I saw (quora.com) next to a link, I would just skip over it.
Quora has managed to brand itself as a Q&A site where you can't read anything unless you verify your identity three different ways (or remember the secret code to type in the URL bar).
I see now that that's not what it is in this case, but I never would have guessed that you could follow a link to quora.com and get publicly readable, long-form blog content. I never even would have consciously thought about it. It's like banner ad blindness; you learn not to see links that are likely to annoy you.
This is the price Quora pays for user-hostile tactics like hiding user-generated content and forcing login - their reputation precedes them. Interesting that this author lauds them as an example to emulate.
tl;dr - Good design is supposed to be about solving users' problems (not just aesthetics), but recently design has become more and more about impressing other designers with your snazzy new cutting-edge interface rather than actually solving real user problems.
If we were to judge news websites using the same metrics as he's using (users in the marketplace) Yahoo! News, HuffingtonPost, and CNN are the epitome of news reporting, which we should all aspire to and emulate.
The lesson from this article is that good design will not make you popular on its own (if that is what you want), in fact it is mostly orthogonal to popularity, just as quality content will not make you popular (on its own), and is not really related to popularity, in fact in some cases quality content will make it very, very hard to be popular (e.g. news). Of course these things are valuable in their own right, and you might want to carve out a niche as a quality provider of content for people who know all about x, at which point you might even become popular in spite of your quality content and quality design.
Facebook is a terrible website in almost every way - the content is bad, the design is worse (though improving) and yet it is very popular. Does that mean we should step back and respect its design (awful), and content (worse) and attempt to emulate them? Does that mean we should not strive for quality content or quality design?
Of course design should be about producing solutions which work for your customers, rather than producing things which appeal to other designers, and UI is not the only thing involved - in that sense some of his criticisms are well aimed. Paper is interesting because it may be beautifully designed, but it has been designed for the wrong sort of content - it would work far better as the app for say medium than an app for FB content. But I think its unfair to judge it entirely by monetary success or numbers of downloads - if that is your sole criteria for success, then you may as well give up on good design, good content, because the majority of people don't want quality, they want quantity, they want pictures (doesn't matter how bad), they want regular stimulation, and sensational stories (true or false, doesn't really matter).
Number of downloads/views is not a good metric for quality or success (unless you mean purely monetary success). By this metric the best things in the world are FB, Angry Birds, and Yahoo News. For many people, success is not measurable purely in downloads or money raised, success is making a good product, not a popular product.
"If we were to judge news websites using the same metrics as he's using (users in the marketplace) Yahoo! News, HuffingtonPost, and CNN are the epitome of news reporting, which we should all aspire to and emulate."
This is a straw man.
The author never argues for popularity; he argues that design should be using its seat at the table to produce better outcomes for users and for businesses. Other than users deciding to use a product, what other metric is there for whether you have built something people want.
re Facebook Paper: "But I think its unfair to judge it entirely by monetary success or numbers of downloads - if that is your sole criteria for success, then you may as well give up on good design, good content, because the majority of people don't want quality"
If we were talking about an app being launched by an indie dev in his garage, maybe you'd be right - maybe. We're talking about an app launched by Facebook.... they have essentially unlimited resources. They have some of the stickiest content on the planet, coupled with an unlimited marketing budget, a big launch, etc. and yet Paper was a flop.
They didn't design something for their users, they didn't solve a problem; instead, they did a neato experiment that didn't create a valuable outcome.
The failure of these products is not solely the designer's fault. Designer only takes one seat at the table, not all of them.
A successful product requires great work from all aspects, insightful business person, great engineer, great design, great marketing and operations. Good products are so rare because all the them have to work out together. Good design can help gain more users, but it alone is not sufficient for the product to be sufficient. If a well-designed app failed, it could be caused by any of the aspects. And maybe because well-designed apps gain so much attention within the designers' community, it is far more noticeable than other types of failures. A product with perfect engineering solution, or with a perfect marketing plan, will possibly fail as well if the design is bad, but the designer community probably don't talk about that.
Although nowadays product designers are expected to take care of more aspects than just the visual design, the overall work is not one man's job. Path's failure is not because the design is bad, but rather something else. Maybe how the marketing people marketed it. Maybe how the business people directed the product. It's nothing wrong to perfect the design details, but it still cannot guarantee a success.
That being said, I think this is a good article and while I'm reading it I'm already rethinking the approaches I'm taking to products.
A bit tangential, but there's an interesting field of design called game design.
In a company with clear responsibility division, game designer is not responsible for making things look pretty at all - the art director is. Instead, his focus is fully on core utility of game - fun. Inventing it, testing it, tweaking it, data-driving it.
I think many designers in other fields would benefit greatly from taking a jab at a small game prototype.
From history-defining classics like Pong and Breakout to iPhone, iPad - coincidence? Doubt it.
I'm still trying to figure out why Web and digital design in general seems to have abandoned high modernism. Many of the problems with the design mentioned have to do with this abandonment.
I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are crimes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime)
I'm not sure it's abandonment as much as a huge cognitive dissonance. Designers are always using that Steve Jobs quote about how design is "not how it looks, it's how it works", and the Dieter Rams principles, all of which are fairly functionalist. It's kind of puzzling, really.
If design only goes skin deep, then it's superficial and not really design. Design isn't just about aesthetics or making things shiny, though it often is. That some or even many companies misinterpret what it means to be design-driven, or fail to do it right, doesn't say anything about the value of a true design-driven process.
I studied Game Design (in Brazil to take that course you must also learn product design in general), and I am a HORRIBLE artist.
And I get depressed every time someone call the artist on my team the designer.
No damnit, I am the designer (and the coder), I design stuff, I don't make the art of the stuff, I design how they work, how they should behave, how the user interacts, and I code that, and the artist make it pretty.
On my own country this is even worse, designer has no clear direct translation, AND sounds analogue to "desenho" ("desenho" in portuguese means "drawing" in english), so when I say I am a designer lots of people think I do "desenhos" (drawings), what I do now is call my profession in portuguese "projetista" (in english it would mean something like "guy that do projects") so that is clear to people what I do.
This seems to be perhaps the fate...like 'digital media' or 'social media' expertise 10 years ago was a thing...now its just baked in. 10 years ago, design was not really a 'thing'...it was brought to prominence but it's perhaps best not thought of as a corporate function like HR or Finance. It's best thought of as part of the DNA of the product/engineering teams working together.
While I generally agree with the direction of this article, I think the author is not rigorous enough.
I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly almost never bats first.
In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that you pay attention to what he states in that talk.
I feel that beneath the surface, this is a poorly reasoned article that only works if you are confused about the difference between visual design and product design. Which is weird because the author makes a point of distinguishing the two.
His confusion probably stems from the assumption that great visual designers will become or should become great product designers. He's seeing beautiful products fail, and worried because the visual designers weren't solving important problems for users. But why would they be? They're visual designers.
His way of evaluating design doesn't make a lot of sense either. Facebook may be fine with Paper's performance if it is intended as a platform where they can experiment without disrupting the experience for most users. Carousel's engagement numbers probably have less to do with the design than the fact that it's hard to get users off of other photo management apps that they already use.
I've found that sometimes its hard to figure out what to test when you are seeking user-centered validation, and then, as a byproduct of having a hard time figuring out what to test, the tendency is to simply put your head down, avoid testing, irrationally fear user feedback, and then focus on pushing to production.
The plan then turns into "I'll test once it's live, once I have actual usage data". But, testing never occurs, and instead, your product team is faced with scope creep. You (or your stakeholders) think that a product is failing because you haven't jammed enough into it already, so go ahead and jam more features into it. Build all the things!
The cycle then repeats until the product is pronounced dead. sometimes on arrival, sometimes many months or years later.
So, the sooner product creators, designers, and developers let go of the fear of testing, the sooner a team can arrive at a product market fit.
Reading this very interesting article, I had another thought, completely unrelated to design. What if the average consumer can't or just doesn't want to reimagine so many things at once? What if we can't have so many revolutions?
Consumer apps are already competing with one another -- even if they are addressing completely different domains -- for mindshare, simply because there are just so many things we can get our heads around. What if products that seek to revolutionize something make the problem worse, because we can only revolutionize a very small number of things at once?
Maybe Silicon Valley should come to terms with the idea that changing the world takes a great many tiny, tiny steps, and change does come but at an infuriatingly slow pace, because that's how we're built?
[+] [-] jessep|12 years ago|reply
The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.
Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.
It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.
[+] [-] thesash|12 years ago|reply
That being said, startups like Uber, Waze, AirBnB, and Nest have all reached staggering levels of success by re-designing the entire stack of user experience in their respective markets. While the interfaces of these products are generally clean, they're not really the crux of the design innovation. Instead, the critical design innovation is elsewhere, in design of the systems, processes, technologies, and even business models that enable a magical end user experience.
[+] [-] albertsun|12 years ago|reply
And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.
It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.
[+] [-] kyro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ykumar6|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conanbatt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steven2012|12 years ago|reply
For example, something as simple as the Google PDF viewer: it took me forever to figure out how to save the file. There are no visual cues whatsoever to tell you how to save the PDF. Maybe it's "cooler" but this is something that you need to figure out to mouse over the bottom right corner and these buttons magically appear. I thought we were done with stupid UX decisions like this back in the 90s.
The same goes for Windows 8. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and I tried using Windows 8 for a good hour, before I gave up. There are too many things that are completely nonsensical and need explanation. It's enough to make me switch away from Windows entirely. How this atrocity could have gone through the entire Microsoft org without getting canned before launch is a testament to how broken that company is.
The opposite is iOS. I really don't like using Mac OS (I wiped off Mac OS from my company Mac laptop and installed Windows 7 on it to be more productive), but iOS can be learned by an infant, I've seen it with my own eyes. That's a testament to great design, because it's so intuitive that someone who wasn't alive 18 months ago can figure out how to use it.
[+] [-] greggman|12 years ago|reply
Go to Notes. Everything is clickable. Click back to Accounts. Now everything except "Accounts" is clickable. Why? How are you supposed to know? Go to the Phone App, pick a contact, The name shows up with the contact's info. Everything on the screen is clickable except the contact's name? Why? How am I supposed to make the distinction?
I know there are better examples but I just clicked the first 2 built in apps I saw.
[+] [-] daigoba66|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknutter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aspir|12 years ago|reply
> users don’t seem to be keen on replacing the main Facebook app
> a sufficiently vague target is harder to miss
The common thread between these products is that they are solutions in search of problems. Great design can't help you find the "problem" to solve faster than any other technique. This is a product/market fit article that just happens to focus on design driven products.
[+] [-] dmbass|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] null_ptr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pshin45|12 years ago|reply
But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"? What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why so few people are using Facebook Paper"?
(I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.)
So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!
[+] [-] general_failure|12 years ago|reply
I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.
[+] [-] carrotleads|12 years ago|reply
and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty.
For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure.
https://square.com/cash
[+] [-] tlb|12 years ago|reply
I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.
The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer, and a great instigator at the top.
[+] [-] nostrademons|12 years ago|reply
I think that the problem is communication itself. Communicating requires creating a shared vision in both the speaker and the listener; when the thing to be communicated is basically emotional (as design is), then reducing this to words necessarily loses information. And it's a low-pass filter: it loses precisely those elements that were daring, unique, and innovative in the original design, because those are the elements that the listener/implementer is least familiar with. Designers try to work around this by using pictures - or even better yet, code - but the problem is that your product is ultimately designed to be an experience, and you can't convey that experience without creating it.
Maybe the critical element isn't who's on the founding team (although having those skillsets covered certainly helps), it's that you can get all of them in a room together and have them each responsible for all of the success of the product. I suspect that a great instigator who goes on eLance and 99designs to contract out the design and programming doesn't do much better than the big company does.
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|12 years ago|reply
Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.
[+] [-] jongala|12 years ago|reply
To the extent that the executive-level perception of design's contribution to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't create a perception of wasted resources.
But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an essential focus for businesses.
It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to have some high profile hits.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|12 years ago|reply
Clarke's Third Law, that good technology is indistinguishable from magic, is apropos in almost any discussion that touches on the osmosis between technical staff and laymen. The laypeople have seen Apple's meteoric rise and heard it attributed to "design", so they think they need a "designer". But Apple didn't get where they are just by hiring random designers. They got where they are by building an entire system that was centered around the vociferous pursuit of a few simple principles. Apple is Apple because they've inextricably ingrained these principles into the corporate DNA. Apple is Apple because they know that "vision" is only a minor part in good industrial design, and because everyone in the company is committed to developing products that exceed expectations along all axes, through art, code, analytics, and other major disciplines.
Laypeople see Apple's attitude and success and think they just need to hire another plucky, divisive guy with an artsy feel to replicate it. They don't understand the work. To them, it's all magic, and anyone with a convincing robe and wizard hat is equally competent.
[+] [-] harlanlewis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rspeer|12 years ago|reply
Quora has managed to brand itself as a Q&A site where you can't read anything unless you verify your identity three different ways (or remember the secret code to type in the URL bar).
I see now that that's not what it is in this case, but I never would have guessed that you could follow a link to quora.com and get publicly readable, long-form blog content. I never even would have consciously thought about it. It's like banner ad blindness; you learn not to see links that are likely to annoy you.
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|12 years ago|reply
Quora is an annoying walled garden that's just a mildly classier version of expertsexchange.
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pshin45|12 years ago|reply
http://insideintercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-design/
tl;dr - Good design is supposed to be about solving users' problems (not just aesthetics), but recently design has become more and more about impressing other designers with your snazzy new cutting-edge interface rather than actually solving real user problems.
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
If we were to judge news websites using the same metrics as he's using (users in the marketplace) Yahoo! News, HuffingtonPost, and CNN are the epitome of news reporting, which we should all aspire to and emulate.
The lesson from this article is that good design will not make you popular on its own (if that is what you want), in fact it is mostly orthogonal to popularity, just as quality content will not make you popular (on its own), and is not really related to popularity, in fact in some cases quality content will make it very, very hard to be popular (e.g. news). Of course these things are valuable in their own right, and you might want to carve out a niche as a quality provider of content for people who know all about x, at which point you might even become popular in spite of your quality content and quality design.
Facebook is a terrible website in almost every way - the content is bad, the design is worse (though improving) and yet it is very popular. Does that mean we should step back and respect its design (awful), and content (worse) and attempt to emulate them? Does that mean we should not strive for quality content or quality design?
Of course design should be about producing solutions which work for your customers, rather than producing things which appeal to other designers, and UI is not the only thing involved - in that sense some of his criticisms are well aimed. Paper is interesting because it may be beautifully designed, but it has been designed for the wrong sort of content - it would work far better as the app for say medium than an app for FB content. But I think its unfair to judge it entirely by monetary success or numbers of downloads - if that is your sole criteria for success, then you may as well give up on good design, good content, because the majority of people don't want quality, they want quantity, they want pictures (doesn't matter how bad), they want regular stimulation, and sensational stories (true or false, doesn't really matter).
Number of downloads/views is not a good metric for quality or success (unless you mean purely monetary success). By this metric the best things in the world are FB, Angry Birds, and Yahoo News. For many people, success is not measurable purely in downloads or money raised, success is making a good product, not a popular product.
[+] [-] adammichaelc|12 years ago|reply
This is a straw man.
The author never argues for popularity; he argues that design should be using its seat at the table to produce better outcomes for users and for businesses. Other than users deciding to use a product, what other metric is there for whether you have built something people want.
re Facebook Paper: "But I think its unfair to judge it entirely by monetary success or numbers of downloads - if that is your sole criteria for success, then you may as well give up on good design, good content, because the majority of people don't want quality"
If we were talking about an app being launched by an indie dev in his garage, maybe you'd be right - maybe. We're talking about an app launched by Facebook.... they have essentially unlimited resources. They have some of the stickiest content on the planet, coupled with an unlimited marketing budget, a big launch, etc. and yet Paper was a flop.
They didn't design something for their users, they didn't solve a problem; instead, they did a neato experiment that didn't create a valuable outcome.
[+] [-] yanghu|12 years ago|reply
A successful product requires great work from all aspects, insightful business person, great engineer, great design, great marketing and operations. Good products are so rare because all the them have to work out together. Good design can help gain more users, but it alone is not sufficient for the product to be sufficient. If a well-designed app failed, it could be caused by any of the aspects. And maybe because well-designed apps gain so much attention within the designers' community, it is far more noticeable than other types of failures. A product with perfect engineering solution, or with a perfect marketing plan, will possibly fail as well if the design is bad, but the designer community probably don't talk about that.
Although nowadays product designers are expected to take care of more aspects than just the visual design, the overall work is not one man's job. Path's failure is not because the design is bad, but rather something else. Maybe how the marketing people marketed it. Maybe how the business people directed the product. It's nothing wrong to perfect the design details, but it still cannot guarantee a success.
That being said, I think this is a good article and while I'm reading it I'm already rethinking the approaches I'm taking to products.
[+] [-] dsirijus|12 years ago|reply
In a company with clear responsibility division, game designer is not responsible for making things look pretty at all - the art director is. Instead, his focus is fully on core utility of game - fun. Inventing it, testing it, tweaking it, data-driving it.
I think many designers in other fields would benefit greatly from taking a jab at a small game prototype.
From history-defining classics like Pong and Breakout to iPhone, iPad - coincidence? Doubt it.
[+] [-] shanacarp|12 years ago|reply
I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are crimes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime)
[+] [-] punee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|12 years ago|reply
And I get depressed every time someone call the artist on my team the designer.
No damnit, I am the designer (and the coder), I design stuff, I don't make the art of the stuff, I design how they work, how they should behave, how the user interacts, and I code that, and the artist make it pretty.
On my own country this is even worse, designer has no clear direct translation, AND sounds analogue to "desenho" ("desenho" in portuguese means "drawing" in english), so when I say I am a designer lots of people think I do "desenhos" (drawings), what I do now is call my profession in portuguese "projetista" (in english it would mean something like "guy that do projects") so that is clear to people what I do.
[+] [-] Mithaldu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BornInTheUSSR|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epayne|12 years ago|reply
I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly almost never bats first.
In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that you pay attention to what he states in that talk.
[1] http://interaction14.ixda.org/program/friday/517-the-de-inte...
[+] [-] mrxd|12 years ago|reply
His confusion probably stems from the assumption that great visual designers will become or should become great product designers. He's seeing beautiful products fail, and worried because the visual designers weren't solving important problems for users. But why would they be? They're visual designers.
His way of evaluating design doesn't make a lot of sense either. Facebook may be fine with Paper's performance if it is intended as a platform where they can experiment without disrupting the experience for most users. Carousel's engagement numbers probably have less to do with the design than the fact that it's hard to get users off of other photo management apps that they already use.
[+] [-] ahmadss|12 years ago|reply
The plan then turns into "I'll test once it's live, once I have actual usage data". But, testing never occurs, and instead, your product team is faced with scope creep. You (or your stakeholders) think that a product is failing because you haven't jammed enough into it already, so go ahead and jam more features into it. Build all the things!
The cycle then repeats until the product is pronounced dead. sometimes on arrival, sometimes many months or years later.
So, the sooner product creators, designers, and developers let go of the fear of testing, the sooner a team can arrive at a product market fit.
[+] [-] pron|12 years ago|reply
Consumer apps are already competing with one another -- even if they are addressing completely different domains -- for mindshare, simply because there are just so many things we can get our heads around. What if products that seek to revolutionize something make the problem worse, because we can only revolutionize a very small number of things at once?
Maybe Silicon Valley should come to terms with the idea that changing the world takes a great many tiny, tiny steps, and change does come but at an infuriatingly slow pace, because that's how we're built?