Design is like Coffee: a Dialogue
As an avid coffee fanatic (and avid designer by trade), I often find myself pondering the connections between coffee and design. In order to further explore the commonalities between the two ostensibly disparate topics, I got on a call with fellow RocketReach designer and coffee nerd Jordan Noeding to get to the bottom of what makes us think when considering the two topics. Please enjoy this silly little conversation we had, that’s perhaps a little bit more casual and full of asides than the usual.
Charles Chen: Thanks for joining me for this conversation, Jordan. Could you talk about your past as a barista at a cafe?
Jordan Noeding: Yeah, I was a barista at a cafe. It taught me a lot about coffee, as well as about handling people. I also learned that I have kind of an evil genius streak.
CC: Go on.
JN: You learn that caffeine headaches are a thing and can be weaponized against rude people. So always be nice to your barista, because she could give you decaf and then you’ll have a migraine the rest of the day and have no idea why.
CC: Hahaha. How do you take your coffee in the morning?
JN: Okay, so for the rest of the year, my coffee’s pretty simple. It’s a pour over with some oatmilk in it. But December’s special, because it’s the only time I put eggnog in my coffee, and I only allow it for the month of December because I’m probably adding, like, 500 calories to it. My coffee consumption tends to go up in December as well, because of the aforementioned eggnog. So instead of like two cups of coffee a day, I’m on like five cups of coffee.
CC: It’s a vicious cycle. The sort of coffee begets eggnog begets coffee.
JN: Right. This is why it’s only for December. I was talking to my mother about this, and she’s like, Why only December? You can get eggnog in like January. You could do, like, you know, until your birthday in January. I’m like, No, no, no. I’ve got a hard rule about this, Mom. If I do this at all throughout the rest of the year, I’d probably give myself a heart attack.
CC: It’s a slippery slope.
JN: So is there anything about design that’s like standing on that slippery eggnog slope? Where we have to have a hard and fast rule or we’ll all just tumble off that cliff?
CC: For me, with document design, it has to do with individual line kerning and tracking. If I start it, I can’t stop it. And the entire document has to has to be know letter spaced to illogical ends. Do you have a similar story?
JN: Preventing one-offs. If someone says, “I want to make this component a one off and it’s fine because it’s just this one time” pretty soon you’ll end up with five different button styles that look very similar. This is why we have to treat the UX design system as the beginning and end for what we do, and one-offs should be avoided at all costs.
CC: I see coffee as ritual, insofar as I make it a very specific way every morning. The actual pour over I think, is lends itself very easily to ritual. Do you have any sort of ritualistic take on design? Do you approach it a certain way, not just for how it might benefit the dev team or the customer, but yourself?
JN: Probably the biggest ritual that I go with with in design is the set of questions that I always ask. “What is the point?” “Did I get there the simplest way possible?” “And if I was a human being who was not good with computers and had never seen this before in my life and had no idea what it does, would I be able to figure it out?”
You never want that sort of hesitation in a user if you can help it. Those are the questions that you’re always asking in everything that you do so that the design lives up to those expectations.
It’s funny that you use the term “ritual” with coffee. My morning ritual with coffee is that I always get my cup, sit down on the couch, and nobody’s allowed to talk to me. I just I need like 30 minutes to just sit there and drink. So my son, ever since he was three, has learned to come down the stairs, request a glass of orange juice, and take it to the other couch. And he’ll just sit there and nobody’s allowed to talk to him for 30 minutes.
So when my husband comes down, it’s my son with his orange juice and me with my coffee. And we just sit there quietly, on opposite couches, just with our drinks.
CC: Customers don’t always like the designs that we produce, whether those customers are stakeholders or end users, just as customers do not always like a particular way people make coffee. How do we address feedback and iterate upon our designs and or coffee?
JN: Feedback is essential, even from someone unfamiliar with design. If a user points out an issue that you couldn’t see, it could be because you’re so engrossed in the design process that you weren’t able to view it from an outside perspective. What may have seemed perfectly understandable may not be so clear to a first-time-user. If you can’t justify it, then you need to rethink your solution.
What may have seemed perfectly understandable may not be so clear to a first-time-user.
There is also a challenge to translating and parsing feedback from users, because people don’t always know why they don’t like something. “It feels off. It feels weird. It doesn’t feel intuitive.” And you as a designer have to take that and translate it into something that’s actually tangible, that can be changed. Just as in a cafe you get customers who say “the coffee tastes bitter” and you’re like, “of course it taste bitter”. As a barista, do I push back on this? Or is something off and someone mixed up the grounds? It’s knowing how to work with people, take their feedback, and know how to kind of sift through it. Because some feedback isn’t feedback, and other feedback is extraordinarily helpful. And that’s how we get good designs and good coffee.
CC: Coffee and Design both require presentation. For coffee, it is the size of the cup, the aroma…
JN: The fern in the foam with the milk.
CC: Exactly! For design, it’s putting your work up on a screen and talking about it. How do your presentation skills carry over from coffee into design?
JN: When presenting to stakeholders, half of it is really believing in it because that translates to any presentation. That includes trust in the dev team to execute and test to produce something functional. So long as you have the ultimate goal of the user flow in mind, and you’re certain that design is addressing that need, you can feel that you’ve put forth the best product.
CC: One final question. How do you measure the success of a design project and how do you measure the success of a coffee shop?
JN: Success is the perception of the the perceived experience of the user for both. So it doesn’t matter if I think it’s a crappy cup of coffee. If you think it’s the best cup of coffee that you’ve ever experienced, and you love the hint of cinnamon I put on it, then it was a successful cup of coffee. Design is the same way. If the user has gone through the website and they think it’s the most intuitive website they’ve ever experienced, the fact that I thought a button being purple seemed ‘a little bit off’ doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, it’s completely up to our users whether design has been successful or not. And that’s kind of where we have room to always improve.
CC: Thank you for your time, this has been a lot of fun!
JN: Yeah! We could do more of these for the blog.
