Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Why you (and I) are not designers

Posted 17 December 2008 @ 11am | Tagged design

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The problem with design is that, at first glance, it seems intuitive.

It’s pretty universally agreed that the iPhone is well designed. What makes it so? The rounded corners and shiny glass? The special effects in the OS? It’s too easy to think that once you’ve seen an example of great design, you can reproduce it. I’m not trying to pick on Microsoft, but the Zune and Windows Vista are failed attempts by engineers to reverse-engineer great design.

Some photographers take great pictures without ever formally learning the Rule of Thirds. Most people take boring or even offensively crappy pictures. Some programmers without formal training have an intuitive grasp of algorithmic complexity and code patterns. Most of them reinvent the wheel daily and write terrible code. In design, there are also people with a great eye and an intuitive sense of the principles of good design. But, like in these other disciplines, they’re very few and far between. Chances are you’re not one of these rare talents, even in your field of specialty. You probably had to learn the rules and practice your skills, like everyone else. It follows then, not having learned the rules of design or practiced them, that you’re not a good designer.

Come to terms with this now, so that no one else gets hurt by your bad design decisions.

Do you know English pretty well? If it’s your native language, you may consider yourself a master. If someone shows you a sentence, you can probably spot grammar mistakes from a mile away. But could you explain the tenses or morphology of the English language to a foreigner? More than likely, you don’t know the technical information about what makes English ‘tick’. In the same way that you don’t know the principles that were put to use to make a great product like the iPhone.

It is too easy to confuse the ability to spot something with the ability to create it, or even explain why it is the way it is. Design, like most other disciplines comes with a set of rules, patterns, and principles. These theories have been developed over time, from experience of other designers solving many problems. Some of these theories are very intuitive. Others are very counterintuitive, like the Paradox of Choice (which is not perhaps per se a design principle, but should inform your design decisions). Most of them require a lot of practice to internalize.

Understand this now: if you did not spend time studying the theory of design, analyzing case studies of past design problems and solutions, and practicing to the point of design becoming second nature to you, you will have a wrong intuition about how things should be designed. You may really honestly think you have an amazing eye, and that you’ve seen enough examples to do it right yourself, or you may simply think design doesn’t affect product sales or customer satisfaction. You are wrong. The sooner you get this, the sooner you can hire the right person for the job, and produce excellent products.

If you don’t really understand grids, you’ll probably create things that are poorly aligned and create confusion in the minds of your consumers. If you don’t know what ligatures, kerning, and letting are, your business cards will look unprofessional, and you won’t realize it (hint: Microsoft Word won’t do it for you). If you don’t know the first thing about color relationships, you’re likely to create combinations that hurt someone’s eyes, or create the wrong emotions for the product you’re selling. If you don’t know about the basics of interaction design, you will design products that are frustrating to use.

You are a not a designer. A designer is someone with training and experience in design. You may convince yourself otherwise, but your customers will not be fooled.

For more on this topic, or if you need a book to convince your boss about hiring a designer, The Inmates are Running The Asylum, is a must read for any engineering manager interested in producing excellent products.

P.S. This is obviously written toward the engineering-slanted audience that reads my blog. If I’ve offended you, good. It’s time to wake up and realize most engineers are terrible designers. Not because they’re stupid or incompetent, but because design is a discipline like any other, and if you don’t expect an English major to write your code, then you shouldn’t expect an engineer to create your design.

As engineers we’re accustomed to scanning hundreds of pages of docs and learning new technologies quickly. Design isn’t something you can learn this way, and it’s a big blow to an engineer’s ego to realize that he has come up against something he can’t learn overnight without tons of dedicated practice. If you read the book I mentioned above, it makes some good points about why the very thing that makes you a good engineer makes you a bad designer.

Hire a designer, and listen to this person very carefully. They know how to make users happy. You don’t. The worst part is if I asked you to solve problems in theoretical physics, most of you would realize right away you don’t have a clue, but nearly everyone thinks they have a clue when it comes to design. If they did, we wouldn’t have so many terribly designed products.

Update: some people thought this post was patronizing. I’ve updated the title to make something clear: I’m not a designer either. I’m just someone who is around them enough to understand that what they do is equally important and complicated as what I do. I’ve taken the time to educate myself as much as reasonable in design, in order to manage design projects and communicate effectively. I have educated myself well enough to know that I don’t know enough.

I’m sure you’re not suggesting that Zune and Vista was designed by Microsoft engineers. People that worked on these projects are at the top of their industry… exactly the rare talent that you mention.

I think it’s more about guidance, dedication and timing. Clearly, MS created far more successful products for years. Apple was struggling in terms of the mainstream market until the ipod came out. But through all those years, they stayed true to the overall concept and when the time came, they were able to capitalize on its success. Microsoft on the other hand panicked and completely overhauled their platform at first signs of serious competition. So instead of innovation came imitation. I think the talent was there, it was just guided in the wrong direction.

I completely agree with you that it’s important to work with professionals and understand your own limitations. But hiring the right talent and guiding them in the right direction is a far greater challenge.

*were. damn.. no edit button?

What I was really pointing at with MS is that it’s an engineering culture, a company founded by and run by engineering minded people.

One of the interesting things you’ll find in Steve Jobs’s biography is how he points to a typography class he happened to take in directing the idea that the Mac should have good typography and font selection. This is not something Bill Gates would come up with. He’s a great businessman and probably a pretty damn good engineer, but a designer he’s not, so his company was not run in the same way as Steve ran his.

I also think it has to do with the design dictatorship at Apple vs design by committee at MS. It’s always hard to tell people that they don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to design, because everyone has an opinion, and as my post points out, everyone thinks their opinion is valid. I think at Apple it’s been made clear that your opinion doesn’t matter.

As far as MS creating ‘far more successful’ products, while it’s true they dominated and still dominate the market for most of their niches, a lot of that is attributed to early mover advantage and sheer money pumped into marketing and exploiting distribution channels set up early in the game (OEM Windows shipped with PC’s). How many people do you know that truly _love_ their microsoft products in the way that apple users love theirs.

Myspace is a terribly designed site that happened to be in the right place at the right time and had a large enough spam list that they could acquire users rapidly. Anyway, I wasn’t suggesting that good design alone is responsible for Apple’s success, or that badly designed products can’t be successful (clearly they are), just trying to make people recognize that design is not an intuitive discipline that anyone can do, but requires knowledge and practice like anything else.

And yes, I agree, it’s all about direction and guidance, this is why as the manager of a project, I make it a point to be educated about design so that I can not only hire the right talent but also guide the design in the right direction, and prevent it from being derailed by well intentioned people with an opinion, but no background or basis for making design decisions.

Yan, this post is right on target and I thank you for publishing it. Greatness is largely a matter of knowing your strengths & weaknesses. If you think you have aptitude in a certain field, got to school, read books, get a mentor/coach… do anything you can to learn it well.

If you’re not willing to take the time to be great in a particular area, partner with someone who has that expertise.

Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and Muhammad Ali are all masters in their fields. And each one needed a coach to get there!

Judge this on a case-by-case basis, perhaps only if the project at hand is being designed, or led by, someone who isn’t the target customer. There’s many examples of successful products which have been ‘designed’ by a programmer who simply wanted to build something that fixed a problem, or improved existing solutions (Napster, Facebook, Google?). On the other hand, I could also dig up examples of applications that would fit perfectly to grid design principles, but wouldn’t be solving a problem particularly well because the designer didn’t grasp the psyche of the end user.

Neil, you’ve hit the nail on the head with your last sentence. It’s the designer’s job to understand the psyche of the end user. Design is not about making things pretty. It’s about communication, usability, etc.

Google is an example of great design. One textbox, one button, easy to use and deliver’s google’s brand message: ‘we are search’. It doesn’t have to have rounded corners to be well designed. Same thing with facebook (well up until fb 2.0 I would say), an app designed to deliver information to users and stimulate communication. It succeeds at both. Of course there is room for improvement, but they’ve done a pretty good job.

I could have written a post that said ‘well in some cases it’s ok not to use a designer’ but it wouldn’t have had the power of ‘you are not a designer’. The point I am making is that while in some cases programmers or other non-designers can come up with a good solution by accident or luck, designers are trained in understanding users and solving communication and usability problems. And that most people don’t realize how bad they are at design because they don’t respect that designing blind (without understanding the principles of what makes things work), is just the same as writing code without ever reading a book on programming foundations. You might get lucky and have something that works, but that doesn’t mean that having an education doesn’t greatly improve your chances of creating something that works well.

Compare the few lucky standout products you mentioned with the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of terrible ones and you’ll see what I mean when I say people don’t realize how bad they are when they create them.

I think part of the problem is that when we discuss design, we usually don’t spend enough time emphasizing the difference between good and bad design.

IMO, everyone designs. In other words, your app will be designed by someone — no doubt about it. But there are those who are more educated, more practiced, more gifted, and sometimes more intelligent, and therefor more apt to hit upon the right combination of things that make a product successful.

It would be nice if people with “designer” in their title were more likely to fall into the above category, but unfortunately two issues tend to muddle up this reality:

1. Some “non-designers” are also able to arrive at good design; either by accident (as you point out) or by advanced skill/intuition.

2. MANY “designers” are not good designers. In fact, many are extremely BAD designers.

These issues have a way of skewing our general understanding of the designer and their market. As a designer myself, I can tell you it’s both pleasant (when I find a non-designer with a good knack for it) and frustrating (when I come across people who claim to be designers but have no business saying so).