Good design is not enough
When great work sits on the shelf.
Designers love designing things.
Good designers love understanding the problems & people they’re designing for and why — users and organizations alike.
Great designers do the above and are able to communicate — i.e., sell — it through into production and the hands of the audience.
Designing is basic because, in a way, everyone designs. Design is, at minimum, an individual act of putting a solution into the world.It’s a foundational behavior & activity. Understanding forces the designer to see beyond themselves and to consider the broader problem space & parties involved. Communicating requires the designer to translate the problem context (salience vs. noise) and how their work meaningfully addresses it in a way that others on the project can buy in.
You could look at it like this, a sort of Designer’s (Vastly Simplified) Hierarchy of Effectiveness:
To borrow from a book that should be required reading for professional designers, Mike Monteiro’s Design is a Job*, “Your toolbox should contain tools for input (goals and research), activity (make things!), and output (sell those things!).” The success of a project hinges on the interplay of these three facets.
Designers can evaluate ourselves in these areas to get an idea of how we can grow professionally.
If you’re really curious about how you perform in these areas, ask others — your team, manager, client—to evaluate you.
Practical dynamics
These aren’t just design/designer attributes, though, because, as we’ve discussed, Designers aren’t the only designers. These factors are in play throughout every project regardless of scope, team, or budget.
Venn diagram:
Design
The work designers love to do, “the rendering of intent” as Jared Spool has put it. Note: “Design” here isn’t limited to the ones who draw things. It could include coders, product managers, project managers…anyone who contributes to making The Thing. I’m also making a distinction between designing & making; of course there’s overlap here, but I want to concentrate on The Why it Exists and The How it Should Be Experienced, not The How It Should Come to Be. I’m not interested** in the identities, titles, or roles involved in design, but the activities, outputs, & outcomes, most notably the work that goes out into the world and the experience it enables. And that means almost everyone on a software project.
This is where many Designers feel most at home & where they spend most of their time. However, this is also where many Designers languish in frustration because the only intent they render is their own self-centric view of a situation. They’ll often have a vision for what it should/could be and anything other (less) than that is unacceptable.
To that point, non-Designers often see this area as the one they’re not good at & therefore have no role in. How unfortunate! Non-Designers often make the most design-significant decisions all because they don’t think of them as design decisions.
Understand
There’s a lot of talk about empathy for users and their needs. There is significantly less talk about understanding & addressing the full set of constraints of a given problem, including the needs of whatever organization a product/service supports. This is one reason I’ve never cared for unsolicited corporate redesigns. They look great, and even inspiring, but they’re not fair to the actual designers navigating the difficult waters of user needs, technological capabilities, and business objectives. Design without the most difficult constraints —e.g., the political ones—is disingenuous, gratuitous, & self-serving.
App stores are full of lonely executions that met neither a real user need or sustainable business model. Fortunately, ideas like value centered design and design thinking (or even just good design process) are gaining steam in many non-startup organizations. Ideally these concepts would find the greatest value overlap between an organization and the audience it seeks to connect with.
We could also add “craftsmanship” to this, the degree to which one understands the depths of their discipline and can put it into practice.
Communicate
For a short time it was a big deal to publicly share the behind-the-scenes of newly-released design work. While it’s interesting to see something of the process/result, it’s much more difficult to do this in real time with real people and their very real, warranted, and powerful skepticism.
I’ve found that this is often a weak-link in the design world: a designer thinks their work is so good that it sells itself, so they present a single comp representing the best possible state and describe exactly what the clients can see. There’s no selling of the problem. There’s no evidence of any thinking behind the design or indication this is anything more than a good idea the designer had. Of course, clients pay us to think about our work, their work; We shouldn’t make them think twice about this.
- What factors did you consider?
- What were your constraints (yes, restate them from the brief along with any others you found along the way)?
- How does this affect other teams like SEO, media, etc.?
- What’s the structure behind the work?
- How does it fit with existing or work-in-progress?
- Why does this address the brief and related issues better than other options?
- How does this impact potential future states?
- What opportunities does this create for us?
- What aspects of the work are critical, negotiable, or inconsequential?
As Mike Monteiro says, “No matter how good the work is, if you can’t sell it you haven’t finished the job.” Where the understanding sphere is about growing empathy, communication is sowing empathy: creating empathy for the situation I’m trying to move forward.
Communication is a double-edged sword, though: the aforementioned lonely apps are also evidence of savvy sellers successfully selling weak ideas, inadequate research, & shallow products. Don’t sell Kool-aid that you’re not willing or able to drink.
Incomplete outcomes
Understanding + Design = Good work that meets a need but never gets to market. In my experience, this is where “academics” struggle. Their passion for craft and solving the problem well are admirable. Unfortunately, no one will ever know how much they care. We can understand our users, the organization, the problems at hand, and the best product to address them all, but if we don’t adequately communicate how all these factors relate, that’s on us.
Understanding + Communication = Shared clarity about the project context and its role in an organization and audience. This is a typical weakness of organizations that fail to integrate Design into their decision-making process. However, researching & discussing & agreeing doesn’t a product make. Jocko Wilinik’s concept of “Extreme Ownership” takes this to an…extreme. And helpfully so, because I can’t see that he’s wrong in this: as someone who might need something from another in order to progress in the way I want, it’s on me to communicate in a way that they understand enough to get what I need. If not everything, I need to identify & understand the fallbacks.
Communication + Design = Work that makes it to the market, but fails for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s not technologically supported. Or it doesn’t meet an actual need for the org & audience, or there’s no internal appetite for a project like this. Agencies & startups are great with this one: selling all kinds of beautiful but poorly grounded work. And then it flops. #whelp
Understanding + Communication + Design = Great work, in market, with positive outcomes for all. This is what everyone wants and expects! It’s also what everyone thinks they’re doing until they realize they failed to account for the gaps in their process.
Closing the gap
There’s often a gap between expectations and reality that (hopefully) closes the further a project moves along. Intent integrity*** points to the degree to which the end product satisfies the perceived opportunity uncovered through understanding, communication, and design. It can be measured against (at least) three criteria:
- Validity: Does the product do what it’s supposed to? Did you misinterpret the research even though the design is great & you communicated it well?
- Fidelity: How well does the product represent the intent? Did the true-to-all & beautiful design get watered down by failed attempts to defend against the corporate bureaucracy?
- Desirability: What emotions will the product spark? You’ve understood the external & internal audiences and everyone’s on board to build it…but is this useful product going to stay in the hands of its audience?
The target outcome of intent integrity is getting the best product for all involved into the market. Depending on one’s organization, intent integrity may be represented by:
- An MVP that can validate/invalidate hypotheses
- “Anything — just ship it!” (#yikes)
- A fully-baked product fully-supported by marketing, distribution, & the rest of the organization
- Anywhere in between these.
Jared continues: “We need to look at our design process as a way to come to a single intention as much as it is to make that intention real in the world.” The design process is both mining & refining, discovery & delivery. As such, there should be back-and-forth between the spheres; in the best cases, it’s not just back-and-forth, but strong, healthy overlap: they are all happening at the same time. This helps to ensure that the target outcome is reached.
For designers, that “single intention” can be our grand vision for this thing we want to put into the world. Chances are, you (we) aren’t good enough for that vision to be perfectly suitable for success without input from others and changes to the vision throughout the process. The design process is a continual refinement & alignment of where expectations & production meet.
Note that this isn’t a linear process, either: it’s a layered set of skills for an individual or team and it’s a process dynamic for a project. These aren’t boxes to check of stage gates to bypass.
A bona fide process
All this is done, of course, in good faith of all parties. This isn’t going to guarantee anyone product success or hearts on dribbble. Quality, skill, and similar attributes are a layer on top of this. But ongoing attention to these aspects will vastly improve your odds & opportunities over projects where they’re neglected. And if your work is plugged into a solid feedback loop, you’ll have an excellent idea about how to improve the work.
What do you think? Helpful? Lame? Nothing special? Leave a comment!
*My original Venn sketch that spurred this post was the outcome & processing of my own situations at work. When I handed off a copy of Design is a Job to a co-worker, I realized that much of what I had sketched was exactly what Mike had written. In what I can best hope is a case of cryptomnesia, I’m indebted to this book for apparently embedding these thoughts so deeply that I didn’t recognize them, despite using them on the daily. Even if they had occurred to me naturally, his labels & framing remain helpful. If you care about growing as a designer and haven’t read this book, take yourself seriously and go buy it. Thanks, Mike!
**I’m not interested at this point. Mad? Leave a comment.
*** Intent integrity is also a phrase I just made up. I think.
