Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

If you've ever seen those Kumon tutoring places, their windows usually have the slogan: "Math. Reading. Success." I always joke to my wife that people should skip the math and reading classes and just take a success class.

Obviously, "success" is real. We can say very clearly that some people are successful, some products are successful, some projects are successful. But "success" isn't a unified thing that you can teach. What makes it possible to be successful in a given domain is different in different domains. To be successful in a foot race and to be successful in stock trading require very different skills, such that you can't teach a "success" class that will make you successful at both a foot race and as a stock trader.

And further, in a lot of endeavors, being "successful" requires not just particular skills to that endeavor, but a lot of different skills. Making the iPhone successful was about manufacturing at scale, software, hardware, marketing, supply chain management, contract negotiation, etc.

Let me suggest that "design" is more like success than it is like math or reading. A product can be well-designed, but I'm dubious that there are unified "design" skills, especially ones that translate across a fairly wide domain. What makes a product well-designed is much more diverse than what people who talk about design typically admit, and I'm not sure that design as a field really makes any sense.

I would define "success" as you've described as the combination of cross discipline work and market forces which produce a desired outcome.

Having good design however doesn't depend on market outcome. You can have good design where noone is using it.

I would say that good design requires cross disciplinary skills or knowledge - requiring a core set of "design skills" plus an understanding of psychology, the end user and the domain it's for. The successful emergent outcome of this is "good design".

The difference between math and subjects such as design or stock trading is that math isn't judged by humans or human behaviour. Design will at the end of the day be judged as good or not by the people that interact with it. Stocks will be judged based on whether others are buying or selling. The skill in these things is predicting human behaviour, following patterns and managing risk.

That's why in design it's a good idea to meet your users, and to iterate following rounds of user testing.

It depends on how you define design. Herbert Simon defined it as “to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” And there’s a lot of academic work around that.

The problem is that that’s not how the word is used in practice. I think most people would call that “planning”, and certainly design is a type of planning, but not all planning is done by people who we call designers.

I think a better definition that’s actually used in practice is that design is a way of looking at a product as if it was a kind of communication. The central question is “how will people perceive this?” so any type of art skill—not just visual arts, but theatre, music, writing, etc—is potentially transferable.

Communication is a universal human skill, so it raises the question of why a separate discipline has emerged in companies to handle the communicative aspects of the product. And I think this is because many people who work in tech fields are educated in fields with very specific conventions of communication, and an expectation that the burden of understanding lies with the listener. When these norms inform the creation of a product, especially when it’s aimed at non-technical users, it leads to “bad design”.

Contrary to what people think, good design is explainable, though designers may do most of the creation in their head. It's like asking why some code should be written this way, there's always a good explanation for good code.

Good design comes from a process, UIUX design for example is a result of product design, which is a result of user needs analysis and requirements gathering in the form of understanding a problem domain deep enough to know what is wrong with the current design, or what is expected of the functionality. This is not about vague "design thinking", but actual auditable design processes that lead to a good product.

> I always joke to my wife that people should skip the math and reading classes and just take a success class.

http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=206

"Your best bet is to be better than everyone else. That works for me, so that's my advice."

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