How your project leader thinks

You can make the wrong thing even if you built it the right way

While Why Design Is Hard was written for designers, my prior book, How Design Makes The World (HDMW), was written for everyone. The goal was to be the best, shortest and funniest intro book designers could give to their teams and clients.

The book has done well but obviously if you haven’t heard of it, it’s new to you. Which is fine! Maybe it’s just what you need right now.

Many lessons in HDMW were secretly written for designers too. The book often puts you in the role of being a project leader or an executive, a kind of role-play we don’t do enough, which teaches better metaphors and language for influencing your team.

Here is one lesson from HDMW on building vs. designing. Hope you find it useful.

How your leader thinks (Building vs. Designing)

To understand the designed world we live in, we first need to acknowledge the state of the universe: it is designed to kill us. More precisely, as best as we can tell, it doesn’t care, or even know about us. We’re lucky just to be here. In all of the indifference of infinite space, there is just one pale blue dot, where, for the moment, we have inherited a habitat in which we can survive. This improbability, combined with our uncommon talents to make tools, grow food and transfer knowledge to future generations, all without killing each other (too much), explains why we’ve lasted this long. But this took effort to achieve. Except for nature’s gifts, we have rarely obtained good design for free.

In people terms, think of good design as a kind of quality, and higher quality requires more skill, money or time. This means that anyone who makes something is under pressure to decide how much of their limited resources to spend on which kinds of quality. Should it be more affordable? Should it be easier to use? Should it be more attractive? It’s hard to achieve them all. Running a business isn’t easy, and most people, most of the time, are looking for less work to do, not more.

To explore these ideas, imagine, as a simplified example, there is a company called SuperAmazingDoorCo. They pride themselves on their idea of quality: making sturdy, reliable doors. Let’s pretend they manufacture Norman doors, the ones with confusing handles, but they don’t know they’re confusing because sales have been good and they’ve heard few complaints. Their CEO is a proud businessperson who wants the company to be even more successful. To her, the company and its doors are designed well, since it’s making a profit and customers seem happy.

The CEO hires you to be the project leader for a new version of their bestselling door. A team of experts at the company from across engineering, marketing and sales is brought in to work with you. In the first project meeting, some important questions come up:

• From engineering: Will the new door fit in standard office building doorframes?

• From sales: Will it look good in the online catalog?

• From marketing: Can it have optional locks? Customers want them.

• From the boss: Can we get this done before next year?

These questions seem fine, if shallow, at first, but some thing is missing. None of these questions will help the team learn about how confusing these doors are to use. This project will still build a door, but the odds are low that it will be an easy-to-use door, since no one has clearly defined what “a good door” means for the people who use it. Regarding ease of use, and most kinds of quality, often building things is easier than designing things.

This doesn’t mean building is easy. Building can be challenging work. Planning and installing the complex fire alarm system at Notre-Dame was very hard. But to build, as I’m using the word, means the goal is to finish building. To design, or to design well, means the goal is to improve something for someone. This means that just because you built the thing the right way doesn’t mean you built the right thing. That’s the missing question from the list: How well does the current door work for the people who use it? And how can we make it better? That is, assuming we decide to care about this kind of quality. As the world demonstrates, not everyone does.

This is where designers come in. Or, at least, where they should. Designers are experts at designing good things, and they use well-established methods to do it. Good designers, especially ones who care about the experience people have with what they create, depend on observational psychology and usability studies, actually watching real people as they try to use things to learn what confuses people. They also use knowledge derived from anthropology, fine art, psychology and engineering, and our ten-thousand-plus-year history of making things for people, from axes to arrowheads to mobile apps. That missing question from the project meeting is actually the first one that most designers, and design researchers, ask.

But many organizations don’t hire designers, so the questions that need to be asked never come up. And, as a result, the folks at SuperAmazingDoorCo proudly believe they make great doors, even though they don’t (at least as far as the people who try to open them are concerned). This is what psychologist Noel Burch called unconscious incompetence, where a person is unaware that they are bad at something (which may remind you of certain friends or coworkers). The way they work, not observing customers or hiring good designers, keeps them blind from the truth and unaware of their incompetence.

Much of the bad design in the world is the result of incompetence, unconscious or otherwise. As book designer Douglas Martin explains, “The question about whether design is necessary or affordable is beside the point. Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.”

Yet sometimes bad experiences happen because you’re using something that was designed to solve someone else’s problem. It’s like trying on a shirt two sizes too large or too small: the design itself might be OK for another person, but it’s a mismatch for you. Maybe all of the ones that fit you have already been taken, or it could be the designer’s failure to consider the sizes and genders of who they were designing for (unisex t-shirts don’t fit most women well, despite the name) or how many of each kind were needed.

In other situations, it’s just that the user and the customer aren’t the same. For example, SuperAmazingDoorCo doesn’t sell its doors to the people who use them to enter and leave buildings, it sells them to the owners of buildings. That customer might be happy with the doors, as they are sturdy, reliable and cheap. Or the architect prioritized stylish doors, or glass ones that allow more natural light, over easy-to-use ones. It’s only if that customer is motivated to care about the people who actually use the door, or the software, or the pub- lic transportation system, that things will change.

In other situations, we are a captive user or captive customer, meaning someone who has no other choice. If we work in a building with a Norman door, or go to visit family in a city only served by one bad airline, what recourse do we have but to use them? And as Laura Ballay, former director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Human-Computer Interaction program, explained once in an online discussion we shared, “Business goals and user goals are often two very different things.” For example, Intuit, makers of TurboTax, is motivated to persuade the US government not to improve its tax forms, as that would hurt sales of their product.

Often, hotel showers or the kiosks in pay parking lots have confusing designs because those businesses know it’s not worthwhile to invest in higher-quality ones: people don’t choose where to stay or park based on ease of use (it’s mostly location and price). Monopolies, governments and bureaucracies can fall into the habit of not making good things, simply because there’s insufficient skill, pride or competitive pressure to improve. It turns out there are many logical reasons, however sad they might be, for why good design isn’t as common as we’d like.

Beyond design quality itself, organizations often convince themselves that their work is better than it is. They reinforce their unconscious incompetence. Some do this with language, for example, calling themselves “customer centric.” But what does that really mean? There’s no official measure of, or license for, customer centricity. It’s just a label any organization can apply to itself at any time, without changing the quality of anything. And corporations, which are profit centric, are at best a balance between generating profits and satisfy- ing customer needs.

A telling example of that balance is what happens when an organization makes you wait. This could be at a doctor’s office, a store checkout line or when you are put on hold when calling customer support. They know exactly how much it costs to hire another person to reduce waiting times, but they’ve chosen not to spend it. Perhaps they don’t think you’d be willing to pay more for better service, or they just want more profit. Either way, all too often, claiming to be customer centric is a kind of design theater: it’s just for show.

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You can buy How Design Makes The World here.