Design can’t save us

There’s a common theme in design circles of the ability of design to save failing products. Can design save our flagging sales? Can design save an industry crippled by a recession? At some point in the near future, we’re most likely going to be asking if design can save our very souls.

Recently I caught a tweet by Ryan Kuder which referenced a TED talk titled Can design save the newspaper? There’s been much talk of this in the newspaper circles that I’m still closely connected to; perhaps a redesign of the classifieds will help generate revenue that papers have been lacking. Let’s move them to the section front pages. Let’s use colour and give people eBay-like microcustomisation of their classifieds. Maybe design is what can really save newspapers.

It’s a problem I have seen (and been really been guilty of) multiple times in the past, one which I’ve come to call the Designer complex. Even Jacek Utko admits in his TED talk above that his motives for his redesigns were “very egotistic;” what he really wanted to do was “create posters.” There’s something about the creative ego that gives us an inflated sense of self; perhaps it happens because design is still ill-regarded as a profession of overhyped, arrogant stylists instead of being noticed as contributing meaningfully to the overall execution of a product. We refer to ourselves as the one true way, dogmatic in our beliefs of style and structure. It’s akin to the monotheistic God: there are no gods; there is no “god.” God is to be revered. God is to be appreciated. So is Designer. Designer is what can save your flailing product. Nothing else is necessary. Just slap some hot typography on it and work on a killer user experience. Let the artistic vision free. Everything else will just fall into place. This idea of industry rescue is one the Designer fantasises about during late night Photoshop sessions. If design can save a company, then assuredly the Designer will gain the respect he or she deserves. Design becomes the panacea of a corporate America writhing in pain from foreclosure and unemployment.

I hate to break it to you, guys

Remember that whole bit above about how designers are often ill-reputed to be little more than trendy stylists? It’s ironic that a profession built upon the conveyance of communication has gathered such a reputation. If we are ever regarded as stylists by our teams and clients, we’ve done an unsatisfactory job of explaining how design adds value. Our Designer complexes perhaps make us think that what designers do is self-evident and needs no explanation. We’ve failed at the communication from the start by positioning ourselves as the masterminds of interactive bagatelles.

Remember that? Someone, somewhere has told nearly every half-reputable designer or design student that what separates art from design is that design is art meant to communicate a message. Design has an ulterior purpose. There is no corollary to ars gratia artis; in the real world, there is no design for design’s sake. As designers, we are auxiliary communicators first and artists second, a thought that might rattle the capital-D Designer ego. However, the end result of this logic will surely destroy the Designer: designers cannot save any industry. Designers can only communicate the core product. It is up to the rest of the team to aid in the design process.

If the product is the engine, design is the engine oil: an engine without oil will not run at all, just as a product without any design will too fail by default. But, as in the real world, some lubricants are better than others: a good interaction designer helps reduce friction in the product workflow for a user. A good graphic designer makes a message easier for a flighty human eye to perceive. Design amplifies and communicates the core product underneath. Design is part of the product. If design is the product, you’re calling the product something it isn’t. That product is more aptly named art.

The responsibilities of engine oil

The engine oil analogy is a prime example why the Designer fails and the designer succeeds in truly getting the message across: a Designer is too steeped in the bubble in which he or she is always right. There’s no way to build an engine out of engine oil anywhere but in one’s imagination.

There’s a flip side to this analogy as well: if the other parts of the team treat the engine oil as an unnecessary or otherwise trifling component, the end result will not be as seamless as they all have hoped. Just as an average automobile with bad oil will run poorly, a product with bad design will suffer the same fate. It’ll go somewhere. Unfortunately for most of the get-huge, make-it-big dreams of Silicon Valley, this strategy will end poorly for most hungry entrepreneurs.

To further kill the Designer ego, there are exceptions to the rule: plenty of products have wildly succeeded without any decent sense of design whatsoever. Craigslist is a notorious target of many interaction designers for being completely disastrous and devoid of really good design. Countless blog posts have criticised and proposed redesigns; a few years ago some A-list designers even had an entire SXSW panel around redesigning the site.

What Craigslist did was built a completely fantastic engine; in the car world, it’s one of those rare flukes you hear about, where your neighbour’s cousin’s great uncle’s Honda Accord went 500,000 miles without ever having an oil change. Of course, with any such fluke there is still a reasonable heap of good luck involved with such meteoric success, but at some point the usefulness of the product stood on its own and became successful anyway. Such things are a testament to the social and technical engineering in any such software product. Since I work in this space (and currently for a competitor of Craigslist) this is the first example that comes to mind and is probably the one I am most familiar with, but it is certainly not the only such example. MySpace is another example of a company that has largely been derided for its poor usability and obsolete design but has also been successful.

Yes, Designer. That means products can thrive without you if they’re awesome enough to stand solidly on their own merit. User experience be damned. The most damning fact toward the Designer complex is probably the fact that no single product lives or dies by the designer alone. A bad product can cover some of its deficiencies with the makeup involved in style by making the product more attractive, but more often than not the amplification factors involved in design also can work against a poor product by amplifying poor product positioning or the flailing of an obsolete model.

Back to design saving newspapers

Whenever I hear news designers talking about perhaps design can save the newspaper, part of me feels bad for my friends that are news designers. It’s a very strong case of the Designer complex. Dead-tree newspapers are an obsolete product. The cooler the newspaper attempts to identify itself as, the more the product looks like that old creepy guy that drives a Gallardo and listens to T-Pain in an attempt to not only feel younger and more hip himself but to desperately seek acceptance from the youthful group that thinks he only appears, well, as desperate as he is. To use the engine analogy, they already bought into the engine you were selling: print mattered to them. Unfortunately for American traditional media, largely stacked as a galaxy of slow-moving conglomerates and still lethargically adapting to the threats of an increasingly connected society, such an approach is like dumping Mobil 1 into an engine out of a Model T. It might make it run a little more smoothly, but the engine is still so laughably uncompetitive that not a whole lot of attention is paid to it anyway. This is what will happen in most cases in the newspaper industry.

In the newspaper case, the trick is to build a better engine and get the designers involved as communicators, not as egotistic Designers. This half-happened in Utko’s case. Drop the complexes and posturing. Work with your teams. Get your engineering and product teams into high gear and build a high-peformance engine that demands a high-performance oil. Many newspapers have embraced this to varying degrees of success. Some are just starting. The New York Times has been trying it with Khoi Vinh. A college friend of mine and interactive designer for USA Today William Couch has been working on the same problems for the national newspaper giant. Friends outside of design are working to transform newspaper companies into leaner, Web-friendly operations by helping to build better engines. Clearly, some really do get it. We’ll have to see if it’s too little too late, but in any case, design isn’t the wonder drug. Just because design can’t be the sole saviour of dying companies doesn’t mean that, like engine oil, it isn’t just as vital to the extreme success of a product as the quality of the other parts itself.

Revisiting the Designer complex

Jacek touched many aspects of what I’ve said above in the oil analogy in his own talk. Design helped profitability. Design made the product better. Design, when integrated into the product process, amplifies the initial message. Jacek’s team helped the reporters and businesspeople build a high-performance engine with the high-performance oil. With this process, with design, the product was better than ever before. But Jacek, it wasn’t just you. At 5:24, when you asked “who’s responsible?” The answer is not “designers,” as you said when you pointed to yourself with both hands. The answer is the whole engine. The reporters, the designers, the businesspeople, those who wanted the content to thrive and modified the entire workflow around the ability to thrive on the better design oil. Without the rest of it all, the design would be nothing but some coloured bricks on the page and a new typeface, the “style” that people expect from most designers.

We can all learn from these successes and failures before we dig ourselves into a deeper hole of being lambasted by non-creatives as arrogant know-it-alls. We can stop being Designers and be designers. We can realise our place and optimise it. We can move forward with, as Utko says at the end, inspiration and determination. As for now, however, I’m going to change my oil.

Comments

Comments RSS Feed for “this post”

External Discussion

No trackbacks have been posted to this article yet.