The Dribbblisation of Design
medium.com
medium.com
In my opinion it's very often a matter of expectations.
When a lot of design decisions are taken by a bunch of people, from management, engineering and marketing, including a designer would simply mean having one more person to compromise with. Companies working this way tend to have designers focus more on making the product look good, thus this dribbblisation of design. On the other side, engineering has historically been expected to deal with design when building products, and nowadays a lot of engineers have learnt how to design on the field. This reinforces the view that designers are only useful to make things look good. Lastly, the tools we use in design are really easy to use, anyone with a couple hours to spare should be able to create some stuff with most of the available tools. With that, it makes deciders think that the only difference will be a matter of taste.
A lot of designers can actually do more than that, the basis of their job is usually to question things with the perspective of the user: "Does it make sense to do this? Is it really useful to have that amount of customisation? How much information do we need to see?" Most of the time the solutions are stupidly obvious, or they're chosen based of how complicated it makes the system, or how costly it can be, and that's where experts add a lot of value.
All in all, if all you need is to make stuff look good, sure a dribbble designer is probably a good fit, just don't expect them to automagically make the product usable. If you want someone to work on your experience, you should probably have your designer work on the problem instead of having them "upgrade" your solution.
Just like how the engineering field is, the design field is really diverse with people doing different things, differently.
(Wow, that was a long rant, sorry about that.)
And then anyone who plays around with photoshop or illustrator for a few days seems to think they are ready for a visual design career (and interaction design is worse!). Who needs design school? So people encounter so many bad poorly trained and experienced designers that their expectations of the profession begin to be lowered. It is frustrating for those who actually went through hard work to become skilled and experienced UXDs.
I'm personally a PL designer and see the same issues in our field (well, it is very niche, and anyone who can write a compiler wants to design a language....).
Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misguided thinking that the designer knows my problems better than myself. Take "you should take your umbrella" weather app. The information density is exactly 1 bit per screen which is abysmal. What about my jacket? Or what if I want to play badminton? Just give me the temperatures and wind info dammit.
There is always a balance between the two. There's room between the pain that is design without consideration of the information and the user, and information accessibility with no consideration for visual aesthetic.
Edward R. Tufte
App developers will create whatever they think might stick. Further, if there were not merit in simplicity, such apps wouldn't be successful.
You are claiming a universal inferiority. Deriving a universal principle from your own singular experience.
That inability to recognise the existence of other viewpoints, and other markets, is why you need a designer's empathy.
It's not that the UX guy knows it better than yourself, but he strives to be able understand it and then to state it more clearly, in an actionable manner. I don't know the call-center operator problems better than he does, but I was able to identify the pain-points and improvements more clearly. While the user will know the problem way better than I do, I can't expect him to systematize and conceive solutions, as well as ways of measuring them.
That's actually what most UX methods tend to to, nowadays. Instead of asking the users, the UX guy will observe (e.g. do job-shadowing).
At least, I've spoken to a few people who feel like that. And I've worked with quite a number of UX people who didn't really seem to have any skills I could easily discern as being useful (but definitely could produce reams of wireframes that made absolutely no sense whatsoever - I remember one hapless UXer who made 10 pages of wireframes describing how he wanted a file upload dialog to work before a developer gently informed him that said dialog was entirely governed by the OS and we would have no control over it).
Maybe the UX designer's job should include more statistics and analysis? It's not enough to draw mocks for engineers and do a usability test now and then.
Unfortunately, the hard truth of it is that most "UX people" are in environments where the post-implementation cycle is ignored. For as many companies out there that claim to embrace the "UX process," I'd say that well over 80% of them don't actually embrace it beyond feature release.
More and more people want to have an opinion and they use medium to share it with the world. This is killing my narrow view of content creation because I am able to asess every single users motivation. With such clarity, I have determined they are, like me, all experienced professionals with 10 years experience putting their best work forward. Have you seen the comments section? People who don't have a masters in literature from Columbia are actually displaying positive sentiment about this trash. This industry is dead because medium, and other blogging platforms, exist and it is much easier to create and piblish content. People are doing this as a hobby, or semi professionally and I don't like it.
Edit: </satire>
After only a few paragraphs in, it became obvious that you've set up a one-paragraph strawman. His point is that the process of design is being traded and mistaken for making things look pretty. Seems like a reasonable argument.
His core argument is that having your design admired in Dribble shouldn't be your idea of a successful design, but instead you should aim at its users, not other designers.
Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better designers to the forefront of product development.
But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and, not only that, do it better that everybody else.
Another difficulty is that much good design is obvious in hindsight, think iPad but the act of whittling away what is unimportant is a key part of the job.
Or yeah maybe you've just dealt with poor designers.
That's exactly the point. Assuming your product will be used by humans, a designer (a real designer; not a dribbbler pixel-pusher) is way better equipped - in terms of methods for understanding users and context - than a engineer or a manager.
Which is sort of why I think designer who can implement design (in HTML/CSS/JS or iOS/Android) is ideal, as they are much more likely to have that sort of "product architecture" thought process; and being as closed as possible to the code which means it becomes easier to adapt the design.
Personally like Ryan Singer's approach to designing as he jumps back and fourth between HTML and Photoshop (https://vimeo.com/16814487), the design gets much closer to reality.
A great deal of excellent maps went through the site, but I became increasingly upset over what I saw as a shift towards presentation-over-substance with the original posts. If you wanted people to play a map, it soon became all but required to have a massive original post, with screenshots and "action shots" and flashy headers to catch people's attention. The focus became more on these OPs than the maps themselves. There was a movement towards standardising the process to reduce the flashy bloat, but it was unable to affect the changes I perceived as necessary, so I ended up leaving the community.
How can issues like these be fixed? Can they be fixed, or is it just a bug in the human code that superficial beauty halo effects everything else out of consideration? Perhaps communities of a certain size eventually reduce to a certain lowest common denominator appeal. I'm not certain.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
In general, as long as the community continues to value substance and the principle of the most charitable interpretation, it will survive. When we start seeing memes and catfights, that's a sign the community is dying.
We actively encouraged what you describe as our short comings. It was in our map posting guidelines that you include lots of screenshots and a well-written write up.
I don't think the issue lied in the community. The larger it grew the better the maps became.
Really the blame falls on me. I had a platform for distributing maps and I had the audience. What I couldn't do was grow up quick enough to really allow the site to reach its potential.
A better comparison would be Dribbble vs IXDA, community vs community, one with the focus on form vs the other with focus on function.
If you look at it that way, the signal to noise ratio is honestly about the same in each community. A couple gems here and there, but 90% of the stuff I see or read on both don't seem to be solving anything.
I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.
I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.
At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.
Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.
Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.
Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.
I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.
There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.
I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and beautiful, as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in a true designer perspective. Software people don't like to admit it, but designers are much more prepared and educated to conceive a product for humans than engineers or managers.
My contention isn't that design is relegated purely to making stuff pretty, but rather that, just as design is more than that, so is dev and so is business strategy and everything else. It's hard (and indeed counter-productive) to compartmentalise any specific discipline.
The other problem is that even if a designer is conceiving the product holistically, if that design is communicated in the form of PNGs or PDFs, it's unlikely that their vision is going to be understood correctly. In a collaborative environment, everyone needs to be part of the design process, because many aspects of good design require an understanding of the thought process that leads to the product as an outcome. The idea of the designer as a visionary who conceives the product and then hands off designs for other people to build is a seductive one, but it very rarely works.
In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user.
Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business with a web site that sells to customers, this is at least as important as unit tests in code.
IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to make the customer experience more positive.
The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't been tested properly, and many elements were broken.
Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.
I agree. That's my experience in this industry, and in big projects. Designers are hired to make things look pretty.
> In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user.
... but with this I can't agree. It's not a reasonable comparison. The full-stack Linux expert won't understand the user mostly because it's not his job to do so. He doesn't have the knowledge and methodology to get to know and understand the user (as well as his context). The UX expert, on the other hand, should be trained specifically to do this in the most systematic and unbiased way possible. He doesn't need exactly to role-play the user (frankly, I don't like this conception of UX, but that's a pet peeve), but he should know and understand him. It's not "I think the user will like this", it's "I know users want this".
> Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made.
And in this we fully agree again. All the knowledge the UX expert can harness about the user and his context should be validated, as early as possible.
Rain amount (bike or bus today?) Wind amount (can I bodyboard today? Rain coat or umbrella?) Temperature (gloves for the wetsuit? Jacket when biking?) Sun amount (can I do a cliff walk this weekend or will the trail be muddy?)
Etc... I don't want an umbrella app, a surf app, a walk app, a bike app... I just want some data that I will use in a multitude of ways.
When I'm interviewing a designer, I don't take it as a positive or negative that they have a dribbble account. If they're interviewing for a position that is primarily visual design, I will peruse their stuff there just to get a sense of their style and capability, but not as a final deterministic factor on their hireability.
Dribbble was never really meant to be a place where people showcased their process, just a place where they could throw out a quick snippet to get reactions. Visual designers find that extremely helpful. If you're not versed in the ideas of typography, color theory, moodboarding, concepting, or any of the other methodologies and tools in a visual designer's wheelhouse, then looking from the outside in at Dribbble can make it seem like a world filled with trite, inefficient, fantastical non-reality.
You're not alone in this. Even I, as a former visual designer, have to tell myself that when I go clicking through Dribbble. It's not a place to showcase fully-polished, finished products - it's not a product marketing site. It's not a place to showcase the messy process of product design - it's not a portfolio site. It's a place where people can toss out ideas and get feedback on the micro-points of it. The colors, they typography, the alignment. Start to expect anything more and the model of the entire site falls apart.
For better or worse, Dribbble is not built to scale as a place for the critique of the entire design process. I think that's where this article gets it wrong. There are plenty of things to critique the site for - the lack of real meaningful engagement, for example, or the highly exclusive invite-only nature, for another - but fundamentally the OPs of this article are projecting thoughts and ideas about what they think/want Dribble to be vs what it actually is.
TL; DR: Dribbble is a place to showcase digital visual art and design artifacts, not a meaningful UX or UI portfolio catalogue.
I don't believe Dribbble has portrayed itself as a site to showcase business case studies. A lot of the time, it's simply a repository of design samples or off-work personal projects. And I'll admit, after a long day of looking at dull wireframes, it's simply a relief to look at a fun UI mockup animation, even if it might not work in a real-life production app.
These days I've reviewed so many portfolios with post-it notes and hand-drawn flow diagrams. Don't they look all the same like dribbble too? Don't they all tell the same story, over and over?