Designing For People

Aesthetics are greatly important. In this society, we are surrounded by visually appealing products. This is why designers are constantly striving to improve the visual appeal of their work. It’s also why car designers fight to put the most beautiful car on the market, and why kettles aren’t just something to boil the water. People want things to look good. We design to meet the demands of people.

But as we get lost in a battle to design something jaw achingly beautiful, it’s often easy to forget what we are designing, building and improving.

A kettle for example, is a product designed and built to boil water — nothing more. So why when buying a kettle are we faced with hundreds of various kettles, each appearing to do different things, each sold as a ‘better’ kettle. It’s because as consumers, we demand things to look great. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact I think it’s a great and powerful thing that we demand things to look great.

But when buying a kettle, all I really want is a functional kettle. I want something that does its job without having a sing and dance about it.

This kettle by Plus Munis Zero (here) is the perfect example of a successful design. It’s beautiful and elegant — but most crucial of all, it does its job.

A product is not a dysfunctional object; its a solid object or a functional application with layers of various features, engineered to serve a purpose.

Product — a thing or person that is the result of an action or process.

As a product designer, my job is to simplify and improve the pain point’s people encounter, on whatever product I happen to be working on. This isn’t something achieved by choosing a new colour palette — this is the result of a process.

This ‘process’ starts with talking to the people using your product. We need to remind ourselves that we design for humans, not users. Users are an object; people are humans, with feeling and emotions. People get frustrated at bad design, and appreciate the small things we do to help them.

Identify what problems these people are having, and ask them what they want. Work with what they enjoy too. If something simply makes sense, don’t be afraid to carry that into another feature. We need to design things that make sense.

Make time to speak to the people that matter.

It’s terrifying to get feedback from real people at first. But eventually it’s going to be the most valuable feedback you’ll receive. Sure, designers provide a great opinion on interactions, and other designer things, but the people using your product, are those who truly matter.

Watching people interact with something you’ve spent hours crafting can be extremely frustrating, but it’s also hugely rewarding. If something felt natural to me — a designer — I need to ensure it feels natural to any other human. Take notes on what takes time and what went well, and work with the research you get. Don’t ignore the details.

Iterate, and iterate some more. And do not be afraid to strip things back for the sake of your users.

Last year, Facebook relaunched their News Feed as one gorgeous feed of white space. It had larger images, a huge smart search bar, and everything else a designer like myself loved to see. It was a ballsy move from a product used billions of times a day, and it failed.

After the re-launch of news feed, and after a lot of feedback from users Facebook decided to pull the new launch. For me, a designer, it was a shame. But for the majority of users, 99% of which are not designers, the new feed wasn’t what they wanted.

Now I’m just a one-man band; Facebook’s design team is extremely talented and I do not for a second believe I could have done a better job redesigning the news feed. But this failure takes me back to my previous point — design for humans, design for the people that use your product.

I get a little frustrated when I see someone trying to redesign a product like Google or Facebook, because they don’t realise just how many hours, and how much testing has gone into designing that simple search bar that people interact with on Google everyday, or the ‘like’ button which is has been billions of times, just today. These things aren’t just designed in an afternoon; they are part of a process.

They’re not ‘users’, they’re humans.

Our job is to please the users, and to design real solutions. Don’t ship something because it looks good; ship something that will make a meaningful change to the user’s experience. Design solutions that build trust, and that add personality; stop designing for designers.

Working with constraints is a challenge, but it’s a challenge we should love and thrive upon. If all our users were designers, our job would be easy. But guess what, they aren’t designers. They are humans who probably don’t give a shit about a background blur if it doesn’t make the experience easier. All users want, is for the product to do its job.

Stop designing pretty graphics, and start designing solutions. Love your users, and they’ll love you back for the work you do.