To The Futures of The Industry
Whether we’re students or freshers just into our first jobs, the industry is naturally ours to inherit. Changing landscapes in technology and styles of design have influenced the field and its importance in products and services alike. But has enough been done for the designers themselves?
I’ve never had a problem with a dumb client. There is no such thing as a bad client. Part of our job is to do good work and get the client to accept it. ~Bob Gill
The backstory
A few months ago an email was sent out to all the students of my institution, an open contest for $100 to design and provide a logo for an upcoming organization (possibly an NGO).
The contest came at a time when I was doing a unpaid internship and ₹7000 would have really helped with my cash crunch. So when I could, I sat down to work on this like it was my internship project, putting my all in to win. Four days in to the deadline, I was done.
I didn’t just have a logo, I had a brand.
But I didn’t win. Instead, they decided to go with this:
I don’t why I lost, and I probably sound arrogant and egotistical, but I went WHAT THE FUCK?
Now this isn’t the first time this has happened. I’ve done my share of graphic design work to know when something’s bad. Years have gone by, I’m to graduate from design school [in a year], and yet I still find people, whether it was high school or engineering school or my current institute, or even in the industry as far as I’ve worked or heard from my peers, people don’t just think that design easy, but they dismiss the efforts and thoughts that people put into it; and more often than not, the people in charge, the people who juggle multiple skills of management, engineering, finance and what not, just don’t seem to have an understanding of design.
I am by far not the most experienced to talk about the status of the industry, but as the next generation take their place in the industry, people whom I’ve worked with and under, I at least have a say in how I’d want the industry to shape up.
Photoshop = Design
There’s a belief that software equals design. If you know how to use Photoshop, you‘re a graphic designer, and if you knew Quark you know Desktop Publishing and if you know Illustrator you know graphic design, but on a different level and so on. But Photoshop and Quark and Illustrator are just the tools of the trade.
Take a look at the image below. It shows job listings for two different companies, one is a startup looking for graphic designers and the other is a listing for a product designer for a company that is known to pay attention to design.
Put everything aside except for the requirements and you can probably tell which is which. The listing on the left addresses the need of the designer, their role in the company, their impact on the product, their place among other teams such as engineering, academic requirement and most importantly, an acknowledgement that their work requires freedoms and while a lot of material will not be used in the final product the effort is recognized and hence all the hard work finds a home. The listing on a right however doesn’t require a designer, but a person who can use Photoshop.
So…
What is design?
Paul Rand seemed to think that design is the product of a careful study and observation; Alina Wheeler is quoted saying design is intelligence made visible; Massimo Vignelli describes design as a fight against the visual disease. But the best definition of design was given by one of my professors, “Design is solving somebody’s problem.” And that should be the job of a designer, to solve problems.
Not recognized enough, lets try branding your company; Customers driven away from you application, let’s design a more user centered interface.
Whatever your field be (graphic, service, UI, UX, CX…) your purpose must be to solve problems.
Going back to the job listings, we see that one listing wants a person to do some work, while the other is making the designer a part of a team of problem solvers. But what’s with the back story?
This isn’t a comparison video
The aim of the article wasn’t to compare the winner and the better design, but it was to point out that no feedback was given to anybody who didn’t win, the absence of a vital information that helps us improve.
“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” ~Paula Scher
In the month of September I was part of a team that participated in a 24hr remote design hackathon conducted by IXDD. The hackathon was remote and we had to post our process on a Tumblr blog and tackle mini-design challenges along the way. We didn’t win, and while it was a fun experience, we were never provided with any kind of feedback.
Feedback
Or rather the lack of it. In a high paced world where projects are put on tight schedules and where time very much means money, we concentrate on the final product and little on process and documentation, but even less on feedback.
Whether you’re a client, manager or any another member on the team, provide feedback. This can include why you like it, what you dislike, how you think the product might be nudged in the right direction or even [if it gets approved] what else we could have done.
Even a little feedback helps a designer (or anyone for that matter) improve and work on their skills and also acknowledges their efforts were not in vain.
Design takes effort
Like any other profession, design takes effort. It isn’t just slapping on some colors and picking out a hip font to make your UI pop. Rather it’s a process of taking a problem and looking at all possible feasible solutions in order to eradicate a problem, ultimately meeting user needs.
For example the Uber app has only a few screens, but that it has taken teams of designers over a decade to create the app we use today, evolving and tackling a new problem every time. And it’s probably not even done yet. In reality, no problem ever really is. And that’s something important.
We can’t solve every problem
Whether it’s societal values or technology, human civilization is changing faster than ever. And for that reason, we can’t solve every problem that arises, which is why companies rebrand, reassess situations and release new versions of their products.
People wanted to see and not just hear them over the radio, enter the television. Now people want to see color, enter the color TV. Better picture? 1080p. More detail? 4K. More color HDR; 3D, 8K, holograms, the list goes on. Decades gone by and the television is still evolving, aiming to solve the problem of people wanting to be immersed in an alternate reality.
But couldn’t we just listen to the users and given them what they want? Why do you want a designer?
It’s because
The user doesn’t always know
Henry Ford is often attributed to saying
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Whether or not he really said this, it points to the fact that while the user doesn’t really know what they want. They may not be able to accurately tell you what it is, they may not be able to provide you with the best solution and they may not be able to tell you the best way to solve it, but they are at the center of a problem. And when we start to understand that problems are centered around the users, we can start to center our solutions around the users too.
An article in The Entrepreneur by Carol Roth talks about how Henry Ford’s quote is often misunderstood as “innovation done without customer input”, when it should be understood as while people would have said faster horses, they would mean faster transportation. They are (in a way) telling you their problem, they just can’t point out what you should be doing to solve it. Enter the designers.
Designers don’t start with the idea, and not at the problem either, they start with what the user thinks might be the problem. Collecting information, evaluating data, revisiting cases, they finally end up with the actual problem.
The Windows Feedback Hub is a great example of solving problems around your customers. For instance while the user may say they want a quicker boot time, the problem could be solved by implementing a feature where even though the overall boot time is the same, the user could start working earlier than before, and hence not realize the identical boot time, because in reality the user didn’t actually want his machine to start quicker, but want to start working quicker.
Now that’s all great, but can’t I just teach my other teams to focus on users?
Well not exactly
Design is a specialization
Anyone can learn to code, engineers, managers, designers, writers; but we hire someone with an expertise in the field to do the job. Why? Cause they are the best suited in terms of drive, passion and overall understanding of the field. They know what they’re dealing with and how to tackle problems in the best possible way. In a similar way, designers deal with user-centricity. While other teams may deliver the final product, all that work makes sense only if the consumer accepts it. Designers don’t just look at the design aspects of the problem, but instead take a holistic approach. They coordinate with multiple teams to gather data that allows them to zero in on the problem. In a way, design is the bridge between teams.
But companies have done well without designers, why spend extra on them?
Design isn’t a cost
It’s an investment. While your app development company will do well just by having a killer idea, investing in a marketing team will help your application reach a broader audience; Determining that audience after build and tweaking your application is what marketing does, determining your users before build is what designers do. Designers are an investment because they save time (money) by eliminating a large number of routes we know from data will not work. They explore any and all solutions at a conceptual level with inputs from various teams and stakeholders, while knowing their constraints. And since all of this is still at a concept level, they don’t cost as much as spending to develop something into a working prototype only to have it fail and scratch our heads to find out what’s wrong.
Design doesn’t just help to identify problems, sometimes it creates solutions unknowingly. An example is the current smartphone designs. Almost every phone looks the same, like a glass-metal brick with ugly camera bumps (come on it’s almost 2020) and weird notches. When most smartphones look alike, different UI designs, features and experiences can help phones stand out against each other. And this is where we need to understand something.
Design isn’t just how something looks, it’s also how it works.
Traditionally design had to do posters and logos, if it looked pretty or eye-catching it was considered good design. But that was never true. Designers of those logos and posters that seem to have no thought to them, were carefully designed by designers because they knew their audience.
Take a look at this Jefferson Airplane poster below.
While it is hard to read, the intention was to appeal to a young generation of that lived during the psychedelic 60s and loved trippy art. The poster resembles the clothing worn by young people during its time and appealed to them by showing the band’s understanding of their culture and mindsets.
But even after years of design it’s important to understand that
Designers don’t always get it right
Everyone makes mistakes. Including designers. Google wave failed but then Google docs emerged, Macintosh TV failed but Apple TV emerged, Nokia’s n-Gage failed but smartphones with the primary purpose of gaming exist today and even though it shares a lot from it’s predecessor, Windows 10 (or just Windows) improved on the shortfalls and the bad user experience of Windows 8.
Money and time were lost, only to be made back after going back to the drawing board and starting from the user.
Conclusion
Full disclosure, the article was going to be a fill on rant about frustrating clients, but upon further reflection and study, it turned out to be about how design is the underdog profession in a lot of places around the world. While companies such as Apple have emphasized the importance of design for a long time, a lot of companies such as Microsoft and Google have either started catching on to the importance of design in recent years. Yet still companies, clients, professionals and even some consumers, that think of design as an extra added bonus that only a lot of capital can buy, when in reality, design is a driving force that needs its importance to be understood.
Design, like many professions in their infancy, still requires to prove itself to be vital for the growth of any product or company. And while this article revolves around design and designers, this could very apply to a number of fields.
It’s high time that people both in and out of design, are taught of and acknowledge the importance of other fields and professions and even though time means money, there is such a thing as adequate time and freedom in every profession.
And just as it is important for some to understand the needs and importance of our own fields, it is also important for us to be able to educate people of the same, cause if people don’t understand, we are as responsible for not helping them understand.
Disclaimer: This article was written as an oped piece for educational purposes only. The article and the author do not intend to demean or cause any harm to any party in any form.
