What design means for Scale up?
What do we think of when someone say the word “design”? We probably think of things like finely material, things and crafted objects that we can hold, feel in our hand, or maybe painting, origami, maps and logos that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design.
But we are not here to talk about that kind of design. Lets talk about the kind that we may not give much thought to and probably use every day. Designs that change every minute. Design like digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend.
Consider the fact that Google processes over millions and billions of search queries every day. Every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded and viewed at YouTube. And Facebook transmitting the stories, messages and photos of billions of people. That’s almost half of the Internet population, and most of humanity.
These are one of the world’s top products and their scale is so huge that it would produce unparalleled challenges. But what is really hard about design is designing at scale. It’s hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, Audacity and Humility.
Audacity, a willingness to take bold risks for believing that the things we’re doing is something that the entire world wants and needs.
Humility, a humbleness to understand that as a developer, it’s not about us or our CV, it’s about the people that we’re developing for, and how our work just might help them.
Here’s a good example I found on, how a very small element can make a big impact.
The developers at Facebook that manages the Facebook “Like” button decided that the button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of the brand and needed to be rethink. We might think, it’s a small button, designing it would be pretty straightforward. Turns out, the team were facing all kinds of limitation like specific height and width, should work in a bunch of multi languages, and also has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers.
So while doing some research on the like button, what I found was unimaginable. The designer who led this estimates that he spent over 200 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. We might think, why would they spend so much time on something so small? It’s because when they’re designing at scale, there’s no such thing as a small detail. This small innocent little button is seen on average 20 billion times a day and on over millions of websites.
In fact, it’s one of the most viewed elements ever created. Now that’s a lot of pressure for a little button and the team behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right.
Respecting the Metrics
One of the most important thing that we need to really understand is how to develop with data. When we’re working on various products , we have incredible amounts of information about how people are using the product that we can be used for influencing our decisions. So as decisions are highly nuanced and we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy.
Sometimes the developers who work on these products are called “data-driven,” which is a term that totally drives us crazy. The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our features when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition.
Data can help you make a good product great, but it will never make a bad product good.
Manage change carefully
The next thing that we need to understand as a principle is that when we introduce change, we need to do it extraordinarily carefully. People often have joked that they spend almost as much time in the introduction of change as doing the change itself, and I’m sure that we can all relate to it when things we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad decisions, and so even by chance if the change is good for them in the long run, it’s still incredibly frustrating when it happens, which is mostly true with user-generated content.
Here is one of the good example when it comes to change. Years ago at YouTube, when there was a five star rating system, people were encouraged to rate the video they have watched and it was interesting because almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star and the lowest one-star rating, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. So they decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting model. It’s going to be much easier for people to engage with.
Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. Now, these things are all really useful. They’re good best practices for designing at scale.
Who we are designing for?
We have to understand who we are designing for. When we set a goal to design for the entire human race, and we start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point we run into the walls of the bubble that you’re living in.
This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it’s what they’ll look like to most of the next millions of people to come online. Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if we want to design for the whole world, we have to design for where people are, and not where we are. So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? We can try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we’re designing for. We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well.
So what does it mean to design at a global scale? It means difficult and sometimes irritating work to try to improve and evolve products.
Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it’s a little tough on the design ego. Because these products are always changing, everything that has been designed is pretty much gone, and everything that people will design will fade away. But here’s what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, we can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world.
Thank you.
