The Structure of Digital Design Revolutions
A new project has me thinking about how digital design has changed over the decades. The shifts I’m thinking about aren’t merely new techniques. They aren’t the occasional yet inevitable calls for eliminating wireframes or personas. Instead they are fundamental changes in how design happens. They are paradigm shifts.
One working definition of design I like to use is that design is a set of perspectives we bring to bear to learn about the world and the people in it. Product teams use a variety of perspectives — like utility and usability and monetization and feasibility, among others — to look at the design problem and its potential solutions. Design needs all those perspectives to produce the best possible solution. Miss a perspective, and risk missing out on an angle that would help you either fully understand the problem or evaluate a solution.
A UI designer and a user researcher serve two different functions on a team, yes, but they also bring two different perspectives. They look at the problem differently. They look at potential solutions differently. The ultimate output of the team is better because it incorporates their different perspectives. Although there are costs to collaboration, insufficient perspectives from diverse team members incurs long-term costs to expand or evolve the product’s capabilities.
Three drivers of change
A paradigm shift happens when an event (or series of events) reveals that a crucial perspective has been missing from design all along. There are three kinds of circumstances I can think of that trigger a paradigm shift.
Harm
One reason a product might cause harm is because no one thought to look at the use of the product from that perspective. Until now, the design process lacked an input that would have highlighted the potential for harm. The safety measures in cars and buildings speak to this. Collision protection and fire suppression measures came about because first there were numerous events and second because there was a push to design for these possibilities.
In the world of digital product design, accessibility is one such paradigm shift. Though one could argue that the shifting is still happening, it became clear in the early days of the web that the technology excluded large swaths of the population. Exclusion is harm. Therefore, the industry took steps to introduce accessibility — really, a new perspective — into the design process.
Accessibility, when done well, isn’t just a checklist of things to fix in your page designs. It’s a new way of looking at problems. It’s not just about color contrast or whatever, but instead making fundamental design decisions about how the product’s content or features can be used by everyone without compromise.
Social Change
Another set of circumstances that triggers a paradigm shift in design is change in society as a whole. The public’s increasing (yet still painfully slow) attention to climate has vehicle manufacturers adapting their design processes to incorporate alternative fuel sources. The increased demand, based on a change in how people view their impact on the ecosystem, compels a new perspective in designing vehicles.
In the digital world, today’s greater emphasis on inclusivity and diversity has the design community (parts of it anyway) thinking about how their processes and techniques have disenfranchised so many people. You can see hints of this: stock photography incorporating greater diversity in its subject matter, for example. But beyond these hints, the user experience design community is being challenged to draw into the process perspectives from a greater diversity of experiences and backgrounds. Today’s heated debate is tomorrow’s paradigm shift.
New Technology
The other thing that triggers a paradigm shift in design is new technology. The most obvious case here is that we need to design products for that technology. The non-digital example that comes to mind is elevators. When I was a kid in lower Manhattan, my dad loved pointing out the Flatiron building to me, New York’s first skyscraper. “What did they need to invent to have tall buildings?” he would ask. With elevators, architects and engineers brought a new perspective to their design process.
In the digital space, the iPhone is a clear example. We went from point and click interfaces to touch interfaces overnight. The paradigm shift, however, was responsive design. Understanding that the digital products and content we designed might occupy vastly different screen sizes forced us to think differently about how we went about designing them.
A more recent technological change is putting design tools in the cloud. Think back even to just a few years ago when you would design in one tool and present in another tool, when people had to comment not on the actual design, but a PDF of your design documentation. Don’t get me started on managing multiple designers working on a file together, or versioning your design files. These concerns have largely evaporated thanks to Figma’s use of the cloud. We think about the design process differently now, thanks to this new technology.
Nothing is a silo
Perhaps it doesn’t need saying, but I’ll say it anyway. These three types of events are not mutually exclusive. Indeed a paradigm shift may only come about after several events have occurred. It’s not lost on me that you can’t talk about the social change of inclusion without also talking about the systemic harm on minority communities. New technologies, while encouraging us to explore new possibilities, often come with new applications that cause harm. Now that we have a better understanding of the psychological harm caused by social media, for example, we’ve got a new perspective to bring to bear in the design process.
Adapting to change
Let’s consider how design communities have embraced change. Or, more accurately, engage with these changes. All paradigm shifts represent injecting new perspectives into the design process — whether that perspective deals with safety or inclusion or something else. Any change to a process brings discomfort. But the circumstances that call attention to the shift seem to have an impact on the community’s willingness to embrace it. How we come aware of the need affects our enthusiasm for addressing it.
Responsive design and Figma were largely met with enthusiasm, even excitement. These technological changes got us revved up about design again, injecting not just new perspectives on how to work, but also new energy about doing design.
Paradigm shifts stemming from harm or social change largely do not produce such enthusiasm. These shifts are generally felt as burdensome. Despite years (decades!) of trying to incorporate accessibility perspectives into our design processes, many teams still treat accessibility as a checklist or afterthought. Compare this to responsive design, a change that happened practically overnight and with nary a complaint. The paradigm shifts initiated by harm and social change are usually met with resistance, even rejection.
It would be easy to chalk this up to new technologies being “cool” and the rest not, but it’s hard to reconcile that with the idea that all these changes come down to the same thing — a new perspective. But rather than relish all new perspectives as valuable and interesting changes to the design process, we characterize some as more of a burden than others.
Recognizing reluctance
If you’ve lived through any of these paradigm shifts, you know the standard array of excuses people use to resist change. Here are four that I hear about accessibility to this day:
Minimizing: Some folks claim that the new perspective can be addressed through a simple fix or small change to the process. They might claim that in some instances it’s not even relevant. Accessibility checklists and the excuse that it’s not necessary for some kinds of web applications persist to this day.
Maximizing: On the flip side, some claim that the perspective reveals a problem that’s too big or too expensive to solve. Accessibility naysayers might say that improving accessibility would require drastic changes that are cost-prohibitive. Systemic harm to minority communities is also frequently painted this way — the problem is too big for one team to solve on its own.
Myths: Some paradigm shifts come with myths that resistant designers use to argue against making a change. One accessibility myth I’ve heard is that making a product accessible will compromise the overall experience.
Not My Problem: Paradigm shifts often come with people who have thought deeply about the new perspective. While these experts help evangelize and elevate the shift, they also provide a convenient excuse for teams who say, “We can’t do this ourselves, we need an expert.” Consulting with an expert is but one strategy among many for bringing an accessibility perspective to your process.
Baby steps
I use the term paradigm shift on purpose. In design, the shifts may not seem quite as revolutionary as they are in science, but in fact injecting a new perspective into the design process is revolutionary. It is a big change: a new way of doing the work. Responsive design isn’t just designing for smaller screens: it completely upended our approach to designing digital products and web sites.
And yet, at the individual level change is hard. The inertia may come from many different places — ignorance, fear, frustration, exhaustion, apathy — but ultimately designers who do not adapt will find themselves left behind. Even accessibility — a perspective that isn’t yet perfectly embedded in our processes — is widely known and understood outside design. Our clients and stakeholders ask about it, and increasingly understand its relevance and importance.
One way to make change is to start small. Do one small thing differently than you’ve done before to incorporate this new perspective. Perhaps in presenting design concepts you highlight how you considered this perspective. Perhaps in doing user research, you include an extra question or two. If you’ve got the time and a willing team, perhaps you do a 1-hour workshop to help others take on the new perspective, at least for a moment. A small change, you might not need to justify to the powers that be. They won’t ask you to justify an additional question on a user research script. You can get away with a one-hour meeting. And who knows? One small step can create an appetite for additional small steps.
You won’t become an accessibility or inclusivity powerhouse overnight. But you’re also playing a long game. When it comes to change, you can’t make a complete change on your current project. Every project is a chance for incremental change, an opportunity to learn a little bit more about what it takes to bring a new perspective to bear in the design process. And small incremental changes, small bits of accumulated experience, all add up to a big change.
