Designers, your best work should be invisible
It’s easy to be fixated on how a product looks, but a nice design doesn’t mean a nice product. The foundations that are underneath the shiny exterior need to be developed and iterated upon. Imagine you want to build a car. But ask yourself: As a UI designer, what does it take to build a car?
At the very least we need to know what it will look like. Grab a pencil and sketch the automobile that’s jumping out at you from the left side of your brain.
Done? Excellent! Now we know what finished looks like. Pick up some tools and let’s start hammering away at our new car. If only this was enough. To build something that even resembles a car we need many unique and reusable components.
Different product experiences are the same beast when executing them. An experience is composed of a collection of user interfaces. User interfaces are an array of curated components. Components are a consolidation of code.
Cars too are an orchestra of curated parts; parts are a composition of atomic components. Some of these components are older than the automobile industry itself: nuts and bolts.
Your component selection, like wooden or steel bolts, influences the final experience of the product.
Designing the final experience is undoubtedly important, but the designer needs to switch roles, and focus on the main building blocks. Throw on a stereotypical artisan maker apron, sit down with a hand file, switch on the magnifying lamp and shape the indispensable components that the product demands.
Having great parts alone does not attribute to a great product. But a thoughtful selection of parts is important.
The path to designing components is paved by discovering the process of getting to the final product. We craft components as a step in the evolving process of building an experience.
Component engineering is critical, but thankless work. No end user will ever attribute the experience of a product to a perfectly crafted radio button. Organising quality components together is essential to build an experience; doing so is a process, not a procedure.
Process
Delivering a product experience involves discovering the process of managing the constraints and materials at hand. Borrowing the now-famous perspective of industrial designer Jony Ive, former Apple CDO, he believes that delivering a product is not about designing a physical thing, but figuring out the process.
In product design, component engineering is part of figuring out that process. Returning to the car analogy, the materials used to forge the components affect the overall performance of a car.
Another takeaway from Ive is his concern for designers graduating without having ever built a physical product. In his own way, Ive is saying that product designers should know their physical materials, at least a little.
This is a trait we can borrow from industrial designers. In software products we tend to ignore the materials (code) that make up products. Now, this is not a broad stroke that dictates all designers need to start coding; instead, start meeting the developer halfway.
The last piece of knowledge gifted from Ive is how the majority of the design work is invisible. The pinnacle of lifestyle brands openly admits that their best work will never be seen by the customer.
The inside of the phone we spent ever such a long time on and 99 per cent of you won’t ever see that… We spent a huge amount of our time working on designing machines.
The effort being applied on the internals of the phone and the time spent designing machines to manufacture the phone is critical but underappreciated work. The customer will be none the wiser about which mountains the design team moved to get this product into your hands.
That freshly polished look
The products we build are complex beasts, and come with many moving parts. Sadly, those parts can be ignored under the pretty exterior. But it is these parts that give the experience.
Effectively, design components are no different. Each has its purpose and doesn’t hinder the user’s experience. Components are often combined and used as a collection. A single component can ruin the whole collection.
Let’s give our components the attention they deserve. Our products stand on the shoulders of countless components, and we assume they are ready for anything.
Take the time and shape that component, so that it fits perfectly. When it is invisible to your users, then you have nailed it.
Care about the design components you and your team are building? Bojagi allows you to collaborate with your developers on components as they are being built.
