The Cost of Bad Design

I recently saw a tweet by Jonathan Shariat that I simply could not stop thinking out.

Yes, this had happened to me — quite a few times. I also asked some other designers whether this had ever happened to them. Each and every one of them agreed —maybe in not the exact same words — but it had happened.

You never say to a developer — “I need this out in 2 days, can you write some shitty code and just get it done?”

Most of us know and understand the cost of writing bad code — bugs, performance issues, technical debt and so on… we know it because we have seen it over the years.

But when it comes to designers, it seems that many in the industry don’t mind, do they? There are many ways of saying —

“We want some quick.”

“We really want to get this out the door”

“Don’t worry about making it good.”

But the basic idea is the same — “Do low quality work because we need to get this finished.”

Why is it okay to ask a designer for low quality work? When did this become a norm? And do people realize what is the cost of bad design?

The Cost of Bad Design

Here are 3 very tangible ways you hurt your own business when you ask for or settle for poor design.

1. You lose users. You wanted to get it out the door after all. But people just cant use your software — they cant figure out where things are, where the menu options are hidden or just how they can do what they came to do.

Here is one simple fact for you all — a product with poor usability, poor design — is going to bleed users everyday. So if you’re losing users or aren't able to retain users over time—maybe its time to take a deeper look at how you do design.

2. You spend more money building and rebuilding
This is works in 2 ways:

First, your designers will not have the time to think of every situation or think through all the different workflows. This means more issues will come up during development. Developers will be confused by the designs, there will be more miscommunication and lost in translation. It just might happen that everything will take longer to build.

Second, Your designer didn't have the time to prototype, test or get feedback. So instead of getting feedback early and often you get the same feedback months later. This is how this works — you release things without testing — customers write in with complains or the marketing department comes back to you with feedback. It takes months before you realize issues you could have seen and fixed had you let your designers follow the process.

3. Decrease Sales/transactions/click-through (or however you make money)
No matter how much you think your users are rational beings, they really aren't. They are making decisions based on feelings. Feeling, affect and subjective satisfaction have more of an impact on a product than anyone is really willing to admit. If a user is annoyed, irritated or just displeased because of something — I can say for sure they will not buy that premium tier that is the source of your revenue. Nor will they click on any ad or buy that thing they were looking at. In your rush to release that thing, you just cost your company revenue.

It can be hard to see at times, but bad design or a bad user experience costs businesses heavily.

Here’s a short and easy infographic for you all.

Thanks for reading!