Yesterday I downloaded the Chase bank app for my iPhone. Because of the small interface, the designers had to focus on things that you *actually do with a bank*, that is, check your balances, and make payments, transfers, and deposits. Not only that but they implemented a long missing feature – deposit checks by taking a picture of them. Why Chase website doesn’t allow this is beyond me (they want you to buy/rent a special scanner scanner from them).

I really like that the iPhone’s constrained screen prevented Chase designers from projectile vomiting irrelevancy all over the screen, and instead placing several large, clear buttons, each performing a task in one screen or one button press that seem to take 3 or 4 screens of navigation on their website. Thank god for the iPhone bringing back sanity into UI design.

Now Chase, please take two steps back, and redesign your website. Try one of those click tracking thingies and see if maybe you can eliminate 80% of the links on your home screen.

1. Music pages need a prominent and centered Music Player. For all the fail of Myspace the one thing they got right is that a band’s page is about its music. The first thing front and center needs to be a Music Player. Instead we get a half-assed music player option which either has to sit quietly in the bottom left hand corner below the fold, or on the Boxes page (if you make Boxes page the default), but then your page looks fairly stupid, because the rest of the good content (Wall) is elsewhere. So – a very quick and dramatic improvement would be to place the Music Player box right at the top of the Wall tab, so that visitors can hear the music and read the news and talk with the band at the same time.
2. A Page’s administrators need a way to get a solid news stream from the page including all comments, likes, and etc. Without this feature it is difficult to communicate with fans. I run a page for my photography on facebook, but I find there is no good way to get all the comments. Instead I have to notice that someone commented, then find the photoset and look at the photoset’s comments to find the actual comment. There is no good way to know that someone’s written on the page’s wall either, unless you have the wall display in Page + Fans mode, and physically check back. A page can only be an effective tool if it enables the administrators to communicate with the people, but without a feed it’s nearly useless.
3. RSS. Come on facebook, it’s 2009! What is the excuse for not having an RSS feed for the page? What’s more, several places on the site have very carefully hidden RSS links (such as Notes), but they don’t even bother putting in the proper HTML LINK element to get it to show up in the browser’s url bar. Get with the program, please.

I don’t doubt that facebook’s engineers are busy cooking up the next redesign and improvement, but I think that if facebook wants Pages to be a successful tool for businesses, bands, and other commercial-ish entities that are starting to make facebook their home, then that area should be their next target for a redesign and rethink.

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 really happy to see that the Rails team and 37 Signals are making this move because it will force Lighthouse to become an even better application as it meets demands of many projects that are sure to follow Rails.

Too many teams put up with products that have terrible usability like Bugzilla because many programmers tend not to think about usability as an important factor. We are used to command line interfaces and white text on black backgrounds. But believe it or not, using something like Lighthouse over say, Bugzilla, boosts your productivity because it is well designed and lets you get to the information you need more quickly and with less frustration. That said, Trac is still many levels above Bugzilla in usability and design so if you’re using an in-house product, I don’t know of many better ones.

Design by committee is a bad idea.

Everyone knows this but few people practice it. There’s an inherent desire to get everyone’s input on the project, especially in a small team. What this leads to is a lot of argument and very little progress.

Especially bad is the idea that team members should give feedback directly to the designer. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, when the entire team is saying conflicting things, the result is a desire to either run away or to produce a design which satisfies everyone’s criticism which usually means a design that is not pleasing to any single person, perhaps most importantly of all the target user.

Any feedback to the designer should be filtered through your design liaison who will speak directly to your designer.

Get educated.

Get someone on the team who is educated on design to be the liaison to the designer. If no one is educated enough, get someone up to speed with the basics. Great resources include Cooper’s interaction design bible: About Face (linked on the left) and the website Boxes & Arrows as well as 37 signals blog Signal v. Noise. Reading the book will get you 90% of the way to being a great liaison leader for a design project.

Speaking the same language increases information flow exponentially. Can you say things like Fitt’s law and Blank Slate View to your designer? Without knowing the basics of interaction design, a team is at the mercy of the designer’s whim. By understanding the basics, there is a common language to speak and fall back on when there is a disagreement between you and the designer. It’s certainly much more effective to explain why something doesn’t work when you can say more than “it just doesn’t feel right”.

Design equals communication.

Adjust the hiring process. Besides the obvious of looking at previous work and references, the big question you want to answer is whether the designer understands your goals and is easy to communicate with. This is not something you’ll glean in a short interview. The way we went about the process was to ask our prospects to complete a short initial design task (usually this involved doing a simple interaction and art direction mockup of one of our pages).

Most designers will be reluctant to do this for free, and it’s ok to pay them for the initial work. Consider it equivalent to a fee you might pay a headhunter. One technique we found particularly effective was to offer a small upfront fee (typically 10% of their total bid) with a promise of a larger bonus if the project went to the designer. In this way, our initial financial commitment was small, and if we found someone who we liked, we had absolutely no problem in paying them an extra bonus — great people are worth their weight in gold.

Pay attention to your designer’s behavior during the initial mockup trial period. Does she go away for three days or a week and deliver something without ever talking to you? Red flag! Design is not about making a pretty picture, it’s about communicating with the client and understanding their needs. Don’t expect the designer to change once hired. If they’re not willing to give you their best during the mockup period, they obviously have more important things to attend to other than your project, so move on.

Our Story

Our first attempts at hiring a designer to revamp Planypus were glorious failures. We saw work that seemed competent, but we failed to realize that above hiring someone with design talent, we needed to hire a good communicator.

The web is the core of our business; communicating our vision to our designer was vitally important. It took us four tries to find someone who got it: Luciano Pouzada. He listened. He asked questions. He critically analyzed the information we put in front of him. And he turned our vision into reality. He was always online, communicating several times a day by email, basecamp, and IM. This made it easy to talk about changes and ideas. He was also passionate about the project, consistently delivering great results and listening carefully to change requests. Even though Luciano lives in Brazil, working with him felt like having him sitting in the office next door. I couldn’t get the same level of communication from many local candidates!

Design cannot happen in isolation. Find a designer who is amazing at communication, and get a strong leader and communicator on your team to understand design enough to talk to your new hire, and your project will be a success!

Maybe cuz I’m not an alcoholic. Brilliant product idea, though!