Designing Everything to Delight

At Argo, we love designing delightful user experiences. We do it in everything that we make.

I’ve found that if you look at the development of internal projects purely from the standpoint of functionality, then you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to make every person’s interactions with those projects more meaningful. My experiences with the tools and materials I interact with on a daily basis are heavily influenced by their design. If a tool is designed well, I will enjoy using it. I will want to use it, and so I’ll use it more.

Hold your internal tools and projects to the same design standards as your flagship product.

When I first started my design career, I developed my design skills by taking every opportunity that I could to design with care. Whether it was a homework assignment or even the cover of an organizer that only I would ever see, I treated the project as if it were a high-stakes commissioned project. If the materials I produced were never touched by another human being and purely served a functional purpose, there would be no experience to be had and the design wouldn’t matter. But human beings are emotional creatures and even if the purpose of a project is to serve some functional purpose, it’s also responsible for the emotional experience it creates with the person interacting with it while it’s serving that purpose.

In the business world, there’s often a noticeable divide between the design standards of internally-facing and externally-facing projects. Posters, presentations, productivity tools, and the like are frequently afforded the bare-minimum level of design to serve their intended purpose. This happens because it’s difficult to prioritize expending design resources on projects that don’t directly define the external brand of the company (or generate revenue). What’s being lost here is that investing in delightful experiences for your team in everything they do will make them happier and more effective. It also creates a culture of design that will engender habits that will carry over into externally facing products.

Designing everything to delight creates a culture of design that will make your team happier and more effective.

The rule of thumb that I’ve developed is to hold internal tools and projects to the same design standards as a flagship product. Don’t skimp on design just because there are fewer people who experience it or people aren’t paying money for it. If something is worth making, then it’s worth making well.

Originally published at argo.io on January 13, 2015.