I Bring Beauty to the World
I once worked with a design manager who was fond of saying “my job is to bring beauty to the world.” He and his staff of seven designers took 6 months to create a UI consisting of half-pixel psychedelic bright glowing lines on a black background.
Which the customers would be using on Toughbook CF-19.
With a 10.1 inch 1024 x 768 display.
In bright desert sunlight.
And I’m not even going to mention the complete lack of secondary error indicators, which pretty much made everything look the same to a colorblind person (7% of the target population), or even someone wearing a pair of sunglasses (90% of the target population). These indicators were removed from earlier drafts because… You guessed it, they were interfering with the “beauty” of the UI.
Bottom line, the interface was completely unusable.
Cost of bringing beauty to the ugly world: 8 people * 6 months = 7680 hours, or roughly $768,000.
Starting the entire design effort from scratch? Priceless.
As designers, we do occasionally bring “beauty” to the world. But that should not be our sole purpose. If you want to fixate on beauty, be an artist.
Design is about much more than beauty. Or rather its beauty is judged by a different yardstick: such as how much money, voter registrations, gallons of drinkable water per dollar spent, etc. the design brings in.
Design is a working solution delivered within a specific time and budget that allows a specific customer to do a specific task.
Simply stated (and most often true):
Designers bring MONEY. And lots of it.
As Clayton Christensen discusses in Innovator’s Dilemma, in different times in the history of a product its success is measured by a different set of parameters, called a value matrix. For instance, in a hard-drive industry initial efforts were judged by capacity, then speed of disk I/O, then, with the emergence of the laptop market, by their small size and ruggedness, and finally by all four yardsticks together, as modern flash memory powering our mobile devices, tablets, and ultra-thin laptops.
Thus a “beautiful” hard drive in the 1970s would be the one with the most storage… kind of like Rubens’ nudes:
Design thrives on understanding the constraints of the world it lives in. Which is why I have come to consider Brand Pyramid as applied to product an essential exercise for any new project — if you do not know all of the constraints, at the very least you document your assumptions so your team is on the same page. (More on this and other essential brainstorming tools later)
The problem is not the beauty itself, but our arrogant high-handed fixation with the techy Western definition of it. It’s not that design strives to bring ugliness instead! It’s just that in design “beauty” gets the expanded definition which encompasses the many parameters of our value matrix.
Because solving a specific problem on time and within a given budget is a beautiful thing.
