Why is Design so Hard?
A summary of what this book is about
Most design books and courses presume that design is easy: the marketing copy usually says if you follow the author’s method or principles, and put enough effort in, magic happens! We know that’s not the whole truth, but younger designers tend to think, “if I learn my design skills, I will make good designs happen in the world.”
Yet designers have a lot of cognitive dissonance. We know the world is filled with bad designs. We find them and make fun of them on social media, often redesigning them for free. We complain about bad design in products, services, government systems and our neighborhoods. Clearly, good design is harder than we often make it out to be. Why is this? What’s missing?
Here are six reasons we’ve found that are central to the book we’re writing. What do you think? What did we miss?
The design hero myth. We are taught to romanticize design as a solitary activity. Design books assume the reader is all-powerful in their projects. It’s assumed that success depends on talent, rather than the ability to persuade, motivate and inspire. But in the real world, many different roles are empowered to make decisions than define what the product is and how it works. This makes design a team process, and not a solitary one. This creates a trap for designers: we frequently feel marginalized and that our turf is violated. Good design depends on navigating this disconnect.
Playing with ideas seems faster than understanding problems. Everyone gets excited about their own ideas and it’s easy to get lost. The real goal isn’t to have an exciting idea, it’s to solve a problem, either for a customer or for the organization. But everyone, including executives and engineers, are prone to getting excited about ideas, even when there is little customer data supporting the problem that idea might solve. And short-sighted leaders often reward people for exciting ideas more than solving problems. Being curious and digging deeper takes time and to the impatient it can seem like a wasted effort. Higher quality always takes more time.
Organizational limits. A good designer who is very talented can still only manage to launch work that the organization is capable of launching. Most organizations are dysfunctional in at least one basic way. It’s hard for most workplaces to ship anything at all, much less something good. This means the real limit on good design is rarely the designer’s talent. Instead, it’s many factors out of their control. Or it’s their ability to navigate the landscape they are working in. In the real world design work is as much about relationships and emotional intelligence as it is about ideas.
It’s a business first. UX designers often take pride in knowing what is best for customers, but the baseline for what is good for customers depends on the business making enough revenue to keep the company alive. Typically there is a successful business before designers are hired. Design jobs are created on the belief better design will improve the business. But a tough fact is that design quality is sometimes less of an important factor in customer purchasing decisions than designers want to admit (low cost and high convenience are often more important). Ignoring or resisting this reality puts designers on the outside of the power structure of a business organization, whereas marketing and product planning often find it easier to align with business leaders than designers do.
Relationships and Stakeholders. We don’t often think about it, but deciding which projects get staffing and budget is a design decision. For example, a designer could have the best ideas in the world, but if their projects don’t get any funding their ideas won’t help anyone. Design in an organization is primarily a social activity: it depends on relationships and earning trust with powerful people. A desire for more relationships is rarely why people enter the design field, but it may be the biggest factor in why designers are successful or not.
Most design is redesign. Design is typically taught in books and courses as working from a blank slate, a version 1.0, but this rarely happens in the real world. This means most designers work on projects with a backstory of assumptions, politics, deals, rivalries and compromises that they may not know about or be prepared to manage. Often early products are made without much thought for UX or design quality, which might have been necessary to get the project launched at all. This means one of best tools designers should rely on is curiosity: why is this project in the state it is in? How do the current players feel about it? Rather than jumping to judgement about how bad things are compared to an idealized UX.
Why do you think good design is hard? Did we get some of it right? What did we miss?
"We know the world is filled with bad designs." Indeed. And this points at a 7th problem. Most people trying to do good design work are unexposed to a wide range of exemplary good design. Simply put, there are not enough good examples of good design that we collectively use to guide new design efforts.
Expanding on that, when we start designing, there is relatively little in the way of broadly agreed upon examples of commercial software and hardware design that delivers measurably effective, desirable, and profitable outcomes. With many other designed experiences—music, movies, books, for example—we have evolved shared definitions of good across various types of each and sets of instances we can point to depending on the context we are focused on. And while some of us point to the designs of companies like Apple as good, today's reference points usually don't come with tangible demonstrations showing why they are good and breakdowns of the elements that make them good.
When reading 6. Most design is redesign, I proclaimed to myself that designers are transitionists which, for me, reaffirms your point of needing curiosity in order to address the business problem in a diplomatic way. Mid afternoon thoughts for you and Zug.