Why is design important?
Design is too huge, complex and ambiguous to explain easily, which is mostly likely why many ignore it.
Here’s the thing though. You don’t need to know or apply everything to get the benefits, especially if you’re working as an independent, or on an early-stage product.
This article is a short introduction to design, and how it can help people who make anything online.
Why am I writing this? I’ve been in design for 30 years and it is still undervalued and misunderstood by many outside the field.
There are still so many basic questions, like:
Why is design important?
Why should you be excited about it?
How it can help you?
If you’re a founder or creator, you’re already making and selling things online. This is an incredibly powerful skill that most don’t have.
What would be even more powerful though, is if you also learn to influence how people use what you make. That’s the superpower using a little design can give you.
So what is it, really? Talk design, and most people’s thoughts jump to colours, fonts and shiny-ness. That’s all aesthetics. They’re the surface layer.
Aesthetics may well form part of design, but what I’m talking about here are basic underlying principles. These can lift the experience users will have of your work. Can they understand it? Can they access it? Do they enjoy it?
Without these answered in some basic form, you are hindering the success of your own work.
If I were to sum it up simply, design is about helping people to feel, understand or do something.
There are two main types of design too, although they overlap somewhat. In a nutshell, Visual Design arranges elements like colours, text and images. UX Design optimises all the interactions.
As a whole, these two types of design can create a more enjoyable, accessible or easier user experience for your work.
What happens if I don’t bother with design?
I’m so glad you asked. So many people ask this and without a good answer, they will conclude “nothing”. It’s fine if they just keep creating, because they believe in the value of their own work.
It’s not quite that simple though. Without applying any design, you just have features and content that you know or think are needed. Their value entirely depends on how well they can be used or understood, so you could be creating for nothing.
Without applying any design, you just have features and content that you think are needed.
Design, however, bridges this gap.
Imagine building a house and the door is hidden around the back, because it was easier to build it there. Maybe the stairs don’t really go anywhere — you just wanted (or had to) include some!
Technically speaking this house still has those features as a product. But they’re not designed in a way that helps the someone use it, or that maximises the overall value.
Applying design from the beginning
We need to challenge another long-held belief. Design isn’t something you should add later, or just before launch.
At the same time you don’t need to apply lots of design. This either/or approach is where many go wrong. Just some small amount of consideration for design will actually go a long way.
Let’s look at this through a couple of examples of well-known brands, who used a little user thinking way back at their early growth stage.
Airbnb is today a very successful, multi-billion company. Yet in its very beginning it was making just $200 a week. They were only thinking about building, and the MVP wasn’t doing so well.
That is, until they put themselves in the shoes of their customers.
When they realised a fundamental user experience problem, everything changed. Their listings’ photos at the time were of such poor quality, even their own staff weren’t inspired.
So they did something that didn’t scale, but helped immensely — they manually helped upgrade the photos on all listings. Visuals matter.
After that, the company’s income doubled.
Now you may argue that the photos aren’t really the design, they’re content. The important thing here is that Airbnb identified something that was holding back the user experience, and ultimately the realisation of the product’s value. They did this buy considering the user, over the features.
Amazon is clearly an enormously successful mega-business today. Much of that success however, comes from a clear advantage — its massive supply chains and distribution network.
In the beginning, these simply didn’t exist — they would take years/decades to build. So how did they grow so big without that advantage from the beginning?
They started out with a lot of manual processes, and crucially — a heavy focus on improving the user experience in every way they could, to drive sales. That bridged the gap before they could scale, helping them grow and build other advantages in the meantime.
Now, if both those examples didn’t feel like design as you know it, I’m not surprised. The point here really isn’t about small visual details —colours, fonts, etc. It was about how these companies had considered how to improve things for the user.
That’s my main point in this article. You don’t have to be a master creative, or a wizard with colours and fonts and layout.
Don’t modern tools have design included?
Well yes and no. Many modern creator tools and resources do have a base level of design included, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to magically fix everything for your work. Context is just as important.
The abundance and low cost of these tools and resources have made it easier than ever to build something, tricking us into forgetting why, or who for. It may be easier than ever to build, but it’s harder than ever to make an impact with it.
We have a tendency to focus on how to build something. If we can also focus on how it will be used, and who by, we will all make more impact.
How to think more like a designer
I’ve lost count how many times non-designers have excused their lack of design consideration by saying “I’m just not creative”. Or, I see people assuming design is some magical thing, that happens naturally for some gifted individuals — not through logic or good thinking.
It’s understandable, but wrong. Design is often confused with creativity, like drawing. And traditionally, we are taught to think about creativity in terms of our identity — we’re either creative or analytical. Doers or thinkers.
Let me tell you, I’m highly analytical and I’m also a designer. I even think it helps with my approach to design.
Design is fundamentally about asking questions first, then making decisions. To make more impact using design, ask more questions while working. Don’t treat it as an afterthought to your work.
Design is fundamentally about asking questions first, then making decisions.
The kind of questions I mean are ones where you get out of your own head and personal perspective, and think about the user while making decisions.
Questions like these:
—Can other people easily use this?
—Am I communicating its value here?
—How will users feel after they using this?
If you have your head down working towards your perception of the finish line, it will be hard to achieve some value for real users. You will have simply not considered them along the way.
You will even find that asking these questions helps you create.
Taking a designer’s approach requires some slowing down.
Modern tools and technology may well be allowing us to create, build and launch so much faster, but that’s where the problem lies.
Taking a designer’s approach requires some slowing down and thinking about your potential users.
This is part of a series on design basics for creators and founders.
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