Enterprise UX — Shred #15

Book Review — How Design Makes the World

How Design Makes the World by Scott Berkun

After years of practice in design field, it is never too late to read an introductory design book. This book was released in 2020 and contains a fresh new perspective on design fundamentals. A minimum amount of “thank you captain obvious” with timely relevant parallels with urbanism and social media make the book a worthy read.

In enterprise software platforms, the end consumer of the business benefits is different from the user, but it is always worth reminding simple four questions.

What are you trying to improve?
Who are you trying to improve it for?
How do you ensure you are successful?
Who might be hurt by your work, now or in the future?

1. This also leads me to think about chatbots for a minute. We know how much it costs to hire another person on the support line so that our customer does not need to wait. But we have deliberately chosen not to do so — chatbots are not driven by ethnographic research of people desperately wanting to have a chat with robots instead of humans.
2. Framing is key to solving user and business problems, and often it is tempting to frame any problem as “the user needs this another website or app.”
3. Surgeon thinking is a funny metaphor for people claiming, “everyone is a designer” and that merely facilitating a group of enthusiasts through affinity mappingworkshop can lead to a complex systems design.
4. A timely observation of drive-by-design is often excused as people first technology later. Unconstrained design only creates problems for others, and in the world of enterprise and professional software, the domain incompetence does not lead to any innovation.
5. Maybe all the applications, websites, and portals we design for our employees are like urbanism — we build our houses without regulations whatsoever, fighting for attention about who designed it best. Cities and cultures we admit often agreed on a set of rules, implicit or explicitly enforced, making some cities in Japan or Denmark surroundings more attractive and less stressful. Similarly, to a system of interconnected tools forming a coherent employee experience over various apps fighting for attention.