Designer Duds
medium.com
medium.com
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.
s/come from/utilize/
Generally, the tech side is one-level-removed. A lot of tech-work involves providing for people... who interact with other people who are experiencing the "real" problems.
Don't get me wrong, it's valuable work (and boundaries can blur) but it's like the difference between... a lawyer and a social worker. Or a bridge-builder versus a traffic planner.
At any rate, less "You came to me for help in achieving legal goals X, Y, Z" and more "the civil-rights organization has hired me on your behalf".
I agree, but the key point in there is that applying new tech often requires significant domain-knowledge in whatever that other industry is.
Generally, this means chains of people, rather than just one person who happens to be both a professional programmer and professional <other thing>.
* In the American sense. In the European sense, this term is often used to denote the design of interactive experiences, which is quite different.
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.
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.
What I was taught as the "design process" is actually much closer to what people study in anthropology and ethnography than business school.
Some of the core requirements involved going to unfamiliar places and just observing, asking questions, embedding yourself in an effort to understand domains and cultures that you aren't familiar with. That was a big part of the point, forcing people into doing that kind of stuff.
Another issue that leads to all this is that "design" is an overloaded word, with many valid uses that are only tangentially related. Product design, interaction design, graphic design, etc., some of these put form over function, by definition, others put function over form, as is their purpose.
I'd say that the main point of the article is that function/purpose/problem/need first design is the revolutionary thing, and there was an opening for the word "design" to resources behind it. Into that opening poured a stream of by great designers from form focused design domain, and the result was disappointing.
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.
And UX design is only about making things easy to use. If they're not,the design is an utter 100% failure.
See: Windows 8, Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity.
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.
> 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.
It's _humans_ that come up with new, innovative products that solve real problems. The profession those humans choose vary.
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!
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.
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.
Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It did not take "seconds". I forget what all the sign-up steps were, but there were a lot of them. Eventually I decided this was way too much effort and information for me to give a site I don't even like, so I left.
Weeks later, I tried to follow a link to Quora again, and it wouldn't let me see anything because it was redirecting me to a page that wanted me to finish the sign-up process. I had to spend even more time convincing it to forget I had ever linked it to my Google account.
Quora is an annoying walled garden that's just a mildly classier version of expertsexchange.
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.
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.
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 author and your comment do implicitly use popularity as the measure of success, which I think is dangerous:
That’s probably because no one is downloading it
Other than users deciding to use a product, what other metric is there for whether you have built something people want.
Better outcomes for users and businesses depend very much on your definition of better, which might range from making more money out of users to helping users get what they want even it if doesn't make money. There's a huge range of potential outcomes which different people might judge to be good, let's not pretend that there is one objective outcome which equals better/success/good or that it is strictly linked with making something people think they want right now. You can also make something they will want in one year, or something they will want when everyone else wants it too, or something only a few want but which you feel everyone might want if only they are exposed to it in the right way.
You can certainly argue that Paper fails to appeal to its intended audience, or deal with the content they have, rather than the content they'd like to have, but part of delivering a successful product is shaping what your users want by delivering something you consider valuable, not entirely pandering to their existing expectations or taste. e.g. iphones vs existing phones, ipod versus CD players etc. so I imagine that was the motivation for it. The trap that FB finds itself in is that they have grown massive by pandering to the lowest common denominator, and now cannot escape that. Sticky content they may have, but how much of it is worth the pixels?
The article and your comment here are sliding from 'better outcomes' to 'number of downloads/users/views/likes' as a definition of better - there are other definitions of better/success/good and some of them even make money (see Apple's attitude to design under Jobs). Things which are popular in a given era are rarely considered good or valuable in the long-term - popularity is an ephemeral and misleading measure of quality if you look at writing, design, art or any other creative field.
If I make something with the intention to sell it and try to sell it with a huge marketing budget and it doesn't sell, it's a failure.
These things have seemingly got no penetration. They didn't even hit a niche.
How is that anything other than complete failure?
You seem to be redefining the meaning of success to be how pretty it is which is precisely the problem the author is tackling:
In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results...A “great” design which produces bad outcomes —low engagement, little utility, few downloads, indifference on the part of the target market— should be regarded as a failure.
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.
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 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)
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.
how old are you?
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...
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.
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.
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?
In fact, I guess most professions followed that exact sequence. Design is kind of an outlier, because it found its place several times, but people keep forgetting where it is. I think that's due to people neglecting it during bad times, that often last enough for forgetting.
Anyway, welcome to a new iteration.
If yahoo shuts down Flickr tomorrow, it's users are screwed. If Dropbox shuts down tomorrow, all my pictures are on a handful of drives. Again, major difference in how it works.
Dropbox turned down buying Everpix last year, who had been an extremely promising photo management startup---because DB we're working on this. Most relevantly, the author of this article gives lip service in the first few paragraphs to the idea that design is how the system works, then reviews them based on the surface UI. He doesn't seem to look at the sync protocols of sync-focused apps!
The only selling point so far is that if someone else uses it to send you pictures, it's slightly easier to save them. Otherwise it's really limited - you can't even do Flickr 1.0 things like group items from multiple days together.
I'm assuming there's a plan to make it more interesting but so far I've had very little reason not to just open the familiar Dropbox app.
>“If there’s not going to be another Google,” Graham said, “then we’re so deeply screwed that we all should be getting bags of silver and shotguns.”
Praise God and pass the ammunition, brother.
The problems in the startup ecosystem are outside the control of entrepreneurs and employees -- it's related to monetary policy and political dysfunction. Problems in VC, downstream from even larger problems in legacy political structures. That political decisions made free $$$$ available to investors to shove $$$ towards useless products to pay $$ to employees to create such useless products is not the fault of the people at the bottom of that stream.
Blaming the little guy is trivial. Blaming the big guys (many of whom have been dead for a century) is not as cathartic or as risk-free.