> If Carousel is intended to solve a user problem, neither I nor other potential users seem to be able to figure out what it is.
> users don’t seem to be keen on replacing the main Facebook app
> a sufficiently vague target is harder to miss
The common thread between these products is that they are solutions in search of problems. Great design can't help you find the "problem" to solve faster than any other technique. This is a product/market fit article that just happens to focus on design driven products.
I think that's the entire point of the article. The premise is that designers have been given a seat at the table because of the perception that they have some advanced insight into producing products with market fit and betting on them is more likely to produce a successful product. The author uses these three apps, a sample of design driven products, to show that lauded designers have no better insight than anybody else. Maybe they're only better at making things shiny, not creating valuable products.
Designers are good at refining existing products for mass consumption, it's engineers that come up with new, innovative products that solve real problems. Expecting designers to be good engineers is insulting to both professions.
Obviously bucketing one or the other is foolish. The people who come up with innovative products are usually called inventors, and they can come from a background of engineering, design, or anything really.
This rings true for me. I studied product design in school, in a program run by IDEO. David Kelley was my advisor. Yet, working in the web world, I don't call myself a "designer". Why? Because I'm not focused on the visual.
The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.
Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.
It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.
If design is about "uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives", then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions (vs aesthetics)?
There's a middle ground of having leaps come from applying technology that already exists, but in novel ways (see: touch screens for the iPhone). So neither purely engineering driven nor purely aesthetically driven.
> then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions
s/come from/utilize/
Generally, the tech side is one-level-removed. A lot of tech-work involves providing for people... who interact with other people who are experiencing the "real" problems.
Don't get me wrong, it's valuable work (and boundaries can blur) but it's like the difference between... a lawyer and a social worker. Or a bridge-builder versus a traffic planner.
+1 your point, but I'm not clear what you're implying about the relationship between lawyers & social workers. (said as someone who works every day with lawyers and has very close relationships with LCSW+ social workers)
Sorry, maybe that metaphor doesn't quite work, I think I had some idea about lawyers who aren't directly contacted by the client but who are being pulled in after some procedural ball has already been put in motion. Maybe I should've said paralegal.
At any rate, less "You came to me for help in achieving legal goals X, Y, Z" and more "the civil-rights organization has hired me on your behalf".
That is if your tech is commoditized. For instance, you could argue surgeon just needs to execute a series of well understood steps and be prepared for various situations along with having the right technique. But there are also surgeons who pioneer new breakthroughs and research new procedures. It seems like a lot of apps aren't really breakthroughs technologically, so your point is valid there, but that's not true for all apps or programmers... off the top of my head... Shazam is an app that I think is tech-driven. One click to recognize a song is a great design, but it didn't take a great designer to make it (just great programmers).
There is also interaction design* to consider, which is completely orthogonal to visual design. In organizations that are not very design focused, interaction design is typically performed by PMs who are untrained in the practice.
* In the American sense. In the European sense, this term is often used to denote the design of interactive experiences, which is quite different.
Sort of off topic: What program was that? And what were some of the most influential/important/essential textbooks/resources/projects available to you? I'd like to piece together a similar curriculum for myself.
Precisely this. The examples in this article are all examples of innovation UI design, which is just a small, albeit highly visible edge of design.
That being said, startups like Uber, Waze, AirBnB, and Nest have all reached staggering levels of success by re-designing the entire stack of user experience in their respective markets. While the interfaces of these products are generally clean, they're not really the crux of the design innovation. Instead, the critical design innovation is elsewhere, in design of the systems, processes, technologies, and even business models that enable a magical end user experience.
To be fair, AirBNB's site ain't all that great, and they only had to improve upon the mid-90s vintage VRBO, which is about the lowest bar for design imaginable.
You miss the point. AirBnB redesigned how one acquires temporary housing when visiting another city (staying at an individual's house, arranged via an online marketplace). Their site's visual design is really ancillary to that.
They did something that caused them to stand out and become wildly successful. If that something is caused by the site being more usable or somehow easier, then they have added something to the business model.
All the training in needfinding, and exploring the problem and solution sound very similar to how business school classes work to me.
And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.
It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.
Business schools have some of this, for sure. But they also have a lot of high level technical analysis (market size, cost structure) and a ton of things unrelated (finance, management, etc.)
What I was taught as the "design process" is actually much closer to what people study in anthropology and ethnography than business school.
Some of the core requirements involved going to unfamiliar places and just observing, asking questions, embedding yourself in an effort to understand domains and cultures that you aren't familiar with. That was a big part of the point, forcing people into doing that kind of stuff.
Another issue that leads to all this is that "design" is an overloaded word, with many valid uses that are only tangentially related. Product design, interaction design, graphic design, etc., some of these put form over function, by definition, others put function over form, as is their purpose.
I'd say that the main point of the article is that function/purpose/problem/need first design is the revolutionary thing, and there was an opening for the word "design" to resources behind it. Into that opening poured a stream of by great designers from form focused design domain, and the result was disappointing.
In the examples (Carousel & Paper) the design isn't coming from the very top. Instead, I suspect the designers were given requirements by non-designer PMs and told to make it look nice. It works about as well as programmers being given requirements by non-programmer PMs and told to make it maintainable.
I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.
The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer, and a great instigator at the top.
It's hard to imagine Drew not caring about design, or not understanding the things you've mentioned. Dropbox succeeded over other competitors mostly because of its fantastic design and user experience. Is Dropbox simply so large now that it's becoming just another typical big company with dysfunction typical of big companies? If so, that's unfortunate. I wonder if YC could amass some wisdom about how to stave off such problems after companies grow really large.
Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.
In Google's visual redesigns - and I've worked on 3 of them now - the design is coming from the top, or rather Larry (or Marissa before he took over) gives carte blanche to a designer and says "Make search look nice". There are restrictions in terms of what is technologically possible or feasible with the engineering resources at hand (steering a massive product like Search to look different or do something different is not easy), but it's not like PMs hand the requirements over the wall.
I think that the problem is communication itself. Communicating requires creating a shared vision in both the speaker and the listener; when the thing to be communicated is basically emotional (as design is), then reducing this to words necessarily loses information. And it's a low-pass filter: it loses precisely those elements that were daring, unique, and innovative in the original design, because those are the elements that the listener/implementer is least familiar with. Designers try to work around this by using pictures - or even better yet, code - but the problem is that your product is ultimately designed to be an experience, and you can't convey that experience without creating it.
Maybe the critical element isn't who's on the founding team (although having those skillsets covered certainly helps), it's that you can get all of them in a room together and have them each responsible for all of the success of the product. I suspect that a great instigator who goes on eLance and 99designs to contract out the design and programming doesn't do much better than the big company does.
Carousel is backed by a huge storage array, and automatically backs up every picture. The author seems to have missed the critical elements of how it works!
For what it's worth, the Flickr app now automatically backs up every picture; so do Picturelife & OneDrive. They all are backed by a storage array that is quite a bit economical when compared to Dropbox's current rates.
I don't believe Flickr keeps and returns to you the same videos you sent it; OneDrive may, but I don't know.
If yahoo shuts down Flickr tomorrow, it's users are screwed. If Dropbox shuts down tomorrow, all my pictures are on a handful of drives. Again, major difference in how it works.
Dropbox turned down buying Everpix last year, who had been an extremely promising photo management startup---because DB we're working on this. Most relevantly, the author of this article gives lip service in the first few paragraphs to the idea that design is how the system works, then reviews them based on the surface UI. He doesn't seem to look at the sync protocols of sync-focused apps!
I find this claim fairly annoying, since the free Flickr service only allows me retrieve my photos in a very down-sized format. Or did they change that in the past few years?
I don't know, but unless your photo collection is really small (few GB) you'll quickly have to pay for its Dropbox storage at which point Flickr will be much cheaper (25$ unlimited per year).
One detail you missed: none of that functionality is new to Carousel – the existing Dropbox app already does all of that automatically as well.
The only selling point so far is that if someone else uses it to send you pictures, it's slightly easier to save them. Otherwise it's really limited - you can't even do Flickr 1.0 things like group items from multiple days together.
I'm assuming there's a plan to make it more interesting but so far I've had very little reason not to just open the familiar Dropbox app.
If design only goes skin deep, then it's superficial and not really design. Design isn't just about aesthetics or making things shiny, though it often is. That some or even many companies misinterpret what it means to be design-driven, or fail to do it right, doesn't say anything about the value of a true design-driven process.
Many (smart) people continue thinking of Design as "how it looks" and not "how it works". Pretty animations and slick frames is not what matter, but what problem are you solving and how.
tl;dr - Good design is supposed to be about solving users' problems (not just aesthetics), but recently design has become more and more about impressing other designers with your snazzy new cutting-edge interface rather than actually solving real user problems.
If I saw (quora.com) next to a link, I would just skip over it.
Quora has managed to brand itself as a Q&A site where you can't read anything unless you verify your identity three different ways (or remember the secret code to type in the URL bar).
I see now that that's not what it is in this case, but I never would have guessed that you could follow a link to quora.com and get publicly readable, long-form blog content. I never even would have consciously thought about it. It's like banner ad blindness; you learn not to see links that are likely to annoy you.
Ironically, the author of the blog post has a blog post (on Quora) talking about how Quora is superior to Medium (because Quora is centered entirely around surfacing interesting content to you).
Funny you should ask. I tried signing up for Quora once. I figured "Okay, they really want me to sign up, and they say it takes 'seconds', so maybe this will be better and more convenient overall."
It did not take "seconds". I forget what all the sign-up steps were, but there were a lot of them. Eventually I decided this was way too much effort and information for me to give a site I don't even like, so I left.
Weeks later, I tried to follow a link to Quora again, and it wouldn't let me see anything because it was redirecting me to a page that wanted me to finish the sign-up process. I had to spend even more time convincing it to forget I had ever linked it to my Google account.
This is the price Quora pays for user-hostile tactics like hiding user-generated content and forcing login - their reputation precedes them. Interesting that this author lauds them as an example to emulate.
I was actually discussing this post a few days ago with one of my UI/UX designer friends, and he made an interesting point - On news forums like Hacker News we see a lot of failure stories from engineers and marketers about how and why their product or marketing campaign failed, usually ending with some lesson about product-market fit and understanding your users.
But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"? What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why so few people are using Facebook Paper"?
(I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.)
So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!
Why talk about it and reduce their value in the market place?
I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.
and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty.
For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure.
I studied Game Design (in Brazil to take that course you must also learn product design in general), and I am a HORRIBLE artist.
And I get depressed every time someone call the artist on my team the designer.
No damnit, I am the designer (and the coder), I design stuff, I don't make the art of the stuff, I design how they work, how they should behave, how the user interacts, and I code that, and the artist make it pretty.
On my own country this is even worse, designer has no clear direct translation, AND sounds analogue to "desenho" ("desenho" in portuguese means "drawing" in english), so when I say I am a designer lots of people think I do "desenhos" (drawings), what I do now is call my profession in portuguese "projetista" (in english it would mean something like "guy that do projects") so that is clear to people what I do.
I had that as formal title once ("Solutions Architect") and people kept assuming I was a building architect (here in Brazil at least building architect is the guy that make the art of the building, the rest is still mostly up to the engineer).
Well, guess what, development were once viewed as a useless hobby, then the cure for all problems, then as a problematic profession that didn't deliver what was expected (because it didn't cure all problems), and then finally got in a place where most people know what to expect.
In fact, I guess most professions followed that exact sequence. Design is kind of an outlier, because it found its place several times, but people keep forgetting where it is. I think that's due to people neglecting it during bad times, that often last enough for forgetting.
Look! Design is fantastic. Organizations that take design seriously make products far better than those that don't. We should applaud and defend the companies that take it seriously, because they're all that's left in this country between something worthwhile and third world mediocrity. Paul Graham said it best in his New York Times interview last year:
>“If there’s not going to be another Google,” Graham said, “then we’re so deeply screwed that we all should be getting bags of silver and shotguns.”
Praise God and pass the ammunition, brother.
The problems in the startup ecosystem are outside the control of entrepreneurs and employees -- it's related to monetary policy and political dysfunction. Problems in VC, downstream from even larger problems in legacy political structures. That political decisions made free $$$$ available to investors to shove $$$ towards useless products to pay $$ to employees to create such useless products is not the fault of the people at the bottom of that stream.
Blaming the little guy is trivial. Blaming the big guys (many of whom have been dead for a century) is not as cathartic or as risk-free.
In the last few years, we seemed to have completely thrown away everything we're learned about UX and essentially made the same mistakes all over again. I don't know what started this trend but it's frustrating.
For example, something as simple as the Google PDF viewer: it took me forever to figure out how to save the file. There are no visual cues whatsoever to tell you how to save the PDF. Maybe it's "cooler" but this is something that you need to figure out to mouse over the bottom right corner and these buttons magically appear. I thought we were done with stupid UX decisions like this back in the 90s.
The same goes for Windows 8. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and I tried using Windows 8 for a good hour, before I gave up. There are too many things that are completely nonsensical and need explanation. It's enough to make me switch away from Windows entirely. How this atrocity could have gone through the entire Microsoft org without getting canned before launch is a testament to how broken that company is.
The opposite is iOS. I really don't like using Mac OS (I wiped off Mac OS from my company Mac laptop and installed Windows 7 on it to be more productive), but iOS can be learned by an infant, I've seen it with my own eyes. That's a testament to great design, because it's so intuitive that someone who wasn't alive 18 months ago can figure out how to use it.
Windows 8 is interesting. After reading the engineering blogs it's pretty clear they designed the UI changes based on telemetry data and not listening to real user feedback.
Intuitive/easy to learn does not imply useful. Some times the most useful things are the ones that have a high learning curve. It seems the tech industry has decided that making things easy is more important than making them useful.
The point is that unless you are in a specific domain where complexity is an unavoidable necessity (let's take 3D modelling as an example for arguments sake) learning a UI, especially when it is a upgrade of a familiar product, should be a simple task of augmenting existing knowledge with a relatively small amount of discovery. I would argue the ribbon menu largely achieved this, Win8 in my opinion absolutely does not. So much so companies are preinstalling 3rd party addons just to get it to a state where people know how to achieve the simplest of goals.
Sometimes it is bad design. When you replace a perfectly good interface -- one users have grown accustomed to for decades -- and replace it with something different that offers no additional benefits, you're a bad designer.
I think iOS used to be as simple as you make it but the new flat design is not. There's plenty of example now of places in apps where one flat thing is not clickable and the flat thing right next to it is. How is that intuitive and discoverable?
Go to Notes. Everything is clickable. Click back to Accounts. Now everything except "Accounts" is clickable. Why? How are you supposed to know? Go to the Phone App, pick a contact, The name shows up with the contact's info. Everything on the screen is clickable except the contact's name? Why? How am I supposed to make the distinction?
I know there are better examples but I just clicked the first 2 built in apps I saw.
I feel that beneath the surface, this is a poorly reasoned article that only works if you are confused about the difference between visual design and product design. Which is weird because the author makes a point of distinguishing the two.
His confusion probably stems from the assumption that great visual designers will become or should become great product designers. He's seeing beautiful products fail, and worried because the visual designers weren't solving important problems for users. But why would they be? They're visual designers.
His way of evaluating design doesn't make a lot of sense either. Facebook may be fine with Paper's performance if it is intended as a platform where they can experiment without disrupting the experience for most users. Carousel's engagement numbers probably have less to do with the design than the fact that it's hard to get users off of other photo management apps that they already use.
The issue is that engineering and design converge insofar as measurable, quantitative data is available for a thing. Good UX is created by good instrumentation that allows for rapid testing and analysis of the way people use your interface as well as an unbiased knowledge of the history of UX. It's not exceptionally likely that a random "designer" will have or understand either of these things, and they're worthless if they don't. What's left for the people who call themselves "designers" is really just fashion, and it changes every few years, like all fashions.
Clarke's Third Law, that good technology is indistinguishable from magic, is apropos in almost any discussion that touches on the osmosis between technical staff and laymen. The laypeople have seen Apple's meteoric rise and heard it attributed to "design", so they think they need a "designer". But Apple didn't get where they are just by hiring random designers. They got where they are by building an entire system that was centered around the vociferous pursuit of a few simple principles. Apple is Apple because they've inextricably ingrained these principles into the corporate DNA. Apple is Apple because they know that "vision" is only a minor part in good industrial design, and because everyone in the company is committed to developing products that exceed expectations along all axes, through art, code, analytics, and other major disciplines.
Laypeople see Apple's attitude and success and think they just need to hire another plucky, divisive guy with an artsy feel to replicate it. They don't understand the work. To them, it's all magic, and anyone with a convincing robe and wizard hat is equally competent.
This seems to be perhaps the fate...like 'digital media' or 'social media' expertise 10 years ago was a thing...now its just baked in. 10 years ago, design was not really a 'thing'...it was brought to prominence but it's perhaps best not thought of as a corporate function like HR or Finance. It's best thought of as part of the DNA of the product/engineering teams working together.
I think it's more related to information architecture. I guess a true industrial designer (in this context, UI/UX designer), should be very aware of the importance of IA for a product as a whole. Too many eye candies in industrial designer world. That's why top players in this field are so valuable. Bringing fusion of aesthetics and functions to the table always gives you the edge. It's just too difficult for most of us to achieve that.
I'm still trying to figure out why Web and digital design in general seems to have abandoned high modernism. Many of the problems with the design mentioned have to do with this abandonment.
I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are crimes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime)
I'm not sure it's abandonment as much as a huge cognitive dissonance. Designers are always using that Steve Jobs quote about how design is "not how it looks, it's how it works", and the Dieter Rams principles, all of which are fairly functionalist. It's kind of puzzling, really.
This is a much needed wake up call for everyone, as we've started to go down the rabbit hole that the post describes. It was articulated in a clear way with tons of concrete examples. I think we'll be looking back at this piece in a few years.
I've found that sometimes its hard to figure out what to test when you are seeking user-centered validation, and then, as a byproduct of having a hard time figuring out what to test, the tendency is to simply put your head down, avoid testing, irrationally fear user feedback, and then focus on pushing to production.
The plan then turns into "I'll test once it's live, once I have actual usage data". But, testing never occurs, and instead, your product team is faced with scope creep. You (or your stakeholders) think that a product is failing because you haven't jammed enough into it already, so go ahead and jam more features into it. Build all the things!
The cycle then repeats until the product is pronounced dead. sometimes on arrival, sometimes many months or years later.
So, the sooner product creators, designers, and developers let go of the fear of testing, the sooner a team can arrive at a product market fit.
While I generally agree with the direction of this article, I think the author is not rigorous enough.
I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly almost never bats first.
In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that you pay attention to what he states in that talk.
Most startups fail; most apps don't succeed to the hopes or expectations of their creators. Just because industry has started taking design seriously doesn't mean we should suddenly expect most startups or apps succeed. And just because Carousel, Paper, Square, Jelly, etc. are well designed, if they fail, that is not a failure of Design itself.
To the extent that the executive-level perception of design's contribution to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't create a perception of wasted resources.
But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an essential focus for businesses.
It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to have some high profile hits.
We're in the middle of "Over-Design". The carousels, slideshows, parallax scrolling effects, top screen loading bars, javascript animations, checkerboard image and text lists are all signs of designers who are trying to fit design in places where its not needed. They're shoe-horning design into pages where the content doesn't even call for it. I think this is because what designers secretly want (being creative and clever) and what users want (simple and working) are starting to mismatch.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] thread> users don’t seem to be keen on replacing the main Facebook app
> a sufficiently vague target is harder to miss
The common thread between these products is that they are solutions in search of problems. Great design can't help you find the "problem" to solve faster than any other technique. This is a product/market fit article that just happens to focus on design driven products.
It's _humans_ that come up with new, innovative products that solve real problems. The profession those humans choose vary.
The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.
Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.
It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.
s/come from/utilize/
Generally, the tech side is one-level-removed. A lot of tech-work involves providing for people... who interact with other people who are experiencing the "real" problems.
Don't get me wrong, it's valuable work (and boundaries can blur) but it's like the difference between... a lawyer and a social worker. Or a bridge-builder versus a traffic planner.
At any rate, less "You came to me for help in achieving legal goals X, Y, Z" and more "the civil-rights organization has hired me on your behalf".
I agree, but the key point in there is that applying new tech often requires significant domain-knowledge in whatever that other industry is.
Generally, this means chains of people, rather than just one person who happens to be both a professional programmer and professional <other thing>.
* In the American sense. In the European sense, this term is often used to denote the design of interactive experiences, which is quite different.
That being said, startups like Uber, Waze, AirBnB, and Nest have all reached staggering levels of success by re-designing the entire stack of user experience in their respective markets. While the interfaces of these products are generally clean, they're not really the crux of the design innovation. Instead, the critical design innovation is elsewhere, in design of the systems, processes, technologies, and even business models that enable a magical end user experience.
And I would guess that those skills are all very valuable, but aren't enough on their own. Lots of the hardest and most important problems and needs to solve in our world are in fields that require deep domain knowledge.
It feels like because so many startup founders don't have the patience to go into a field and acquire that domain knowledge everyone is focused on problems that yuppies have that can be solved by looking at a screen.
What I was taught as the "design process" is actually much closer to what people study in anthropology and ethnography than business school.
Some of the core requirements involved going to unfamiliar places and just observing, asking questions, embedding yourself in an effort to understand domains and cultures that you aren't familiar with. That was a big part of the point, forcing people into doing that kind of stuff.
Another issue that leads to all this is that "design" is an overloaded word, with many valid uses that are only tangentially related. Product design, interaction design, graphic design, etc., some of these put form over function, by definition, others put function over form, as is their purpose.
I'd say that the main point of the article is that function/purpose/problem/need first design is the revolutionary thing, and there was an opening for the word "design" to resources behind it. Into that opening poured a stream of by great designers from form focused design domain, and the result was disappointing.
I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.
The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer, and a great instigator at the top.
Thanks for chiming in with an inside view, by the way.
I think that the problem is communication itself. Communicating requires creating a shared vision in both the speaker and the listener; when the thing to be communicated is basically emotional (as design is), then reducing this to words necessarily loses information. And it's a low-pass filter: it loses precisely those elements that were daring, unique, and innovative in the original design, because those are the elements that the listener/implementer is least familiar with. Designers try to work around this by using pictures - or even better yet, code - but the problem is that your product is ultimately designed to be an experience, and you can't convey that experience without creating it.
Maybe the critical element isn't who's on the founding team (although having those skillsets covered certainly helps), it's that you can get all of them in a room together and have them each responsible for all of the success of the product. I suspect that a great instigator who goes on eLance and 99designs to contract out the design and programming doesn't do much better than the big company does.
If yahoo shuts down Flickr tomorrow, it's users are screwed. If Dropbox shuts down tomorrow, all my pictures are on a handful of drives. Again, major difference in how it works.
Dropbox turned down buying Everpix last year, who had been an extremely promising photo management startup---because DB we're working on this. Most relevantly, the author of this article gives lip service in the first few paragraphs to the idea that design is how the system works, then reviews them based on the surface UI. He doesn't seem to look at the sync protocols of sync-focused apps!
The only selling point so far is that if someone else uses it to send you pictures, it's slightly easier to save them. Otherwise it's really limited - you can't even do Flickr 1.0 things like group items from multiple days together.
I'm assuming there's a plan to make it more interesting but so far I've had very little reason not to just open the familiar Dropbox app.
http://insideintercom.io/the-dribbblisation-of-design/
tl;dr - Good design is supposed to be about solving users' problems (not just aesthetics), but recently design has become more and more about impressing other designers with your snazzy new cutting-edge interface rather than actually solving real user problems.
Quora has managed to brand itself as a Q&A site where you can't read anything unless you verify your identity three different ways (or remember the secret code to type in the URL bar).
I see now that that's not what it is in this case, but I never would have guessed that you could follow a link to quora.com and get publicly readable, long-form blog content. I never even would have consciously thought about it. It's like banner ad blindness; you learn not to see links that are likely to annoy you.
It did not take "seconds". I forget what all the sign-up steps were, but there were a lot of them. Eventually I decided this was way too much effort and information for me to give a site I don't even like, so I left.
Weeks later, I tried to follow a link to Quora again, and it wouldn't let me see anything because it was redirecting me to a page that wanted me to finish the sign-up process. I had to spend even more time convincing it to forget I had ever linked it to my Google account.
Quora is an annoying walled garden that's just a mildly classier version of expertsexchange.
But my friend posed the question, Why don't more designers talk about their design failures? For example, Julie Zhou (Director of Product Design at Facebook) has written some awesome blog posts on Medium about her design process, but what if she also wrote an essay about "Why Facebook Home Failed"? What if Mike Matas (Design Lead for Facebook Paper) wrote an essay about "Why so few people are using Facebook Paper"?
(I have no stats on the % of "failure stories" that are written by designers vs engineers vs marketers, but anecdotally it seemed to ring true to me.)
So why is it that designers don't like talking about their failed designs? I thought about it long and hard but couldn't think of a good reason why that might be. Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter!
I have hardly seen CEOs blog openly about their failures as well. It is career suicide. There are very few people who would think of these writeups as some sort of 'open' and 'honest' communication. And TBH, I think people do that only if those people are already successful and this was some one-off.
and on the same note when designers change their previous designs, are they stating that the older design "failed" or didn't work or is always just for novelty.
For ex: I love Square cash's earlier page design and I clearly understood how it worked. But now its changed. Did it not work earlier? Was it a failure.
https://square.com/cash
And I get depressed every time someone call the artist on my team the designer.
No damnit, I am the designer (and the coder), I design stuff, I don't make the art of the stuff, I design how they work, how they should behave, how the user interacts, and I code that, and the artist make it pretty.
On my own country this is even worse, designer has no clear direct translation, AND sounds analogue to "desenho" ("desenho" in portuguese means "drawing" in english), so when I say I am a designer lots of people think I do "desenhos" (drawings), what I do now is call my profession in portuguese "projetista" (in english it would mean something like "guy that do projects") so that is clear to people what I do.
In fact, I guess most professions followed that exact sequence. Design is kind of an outlier, because it found its place several times, but people keep forgetting where it is. I think that's due to people neglecting it during bad times, that often last enough for forgetting.
Anyway, welcome to a new iteration.
>“If there’s not going to be another Google,” Graham said, “then we’re so deeply screwed that we all should be getting bags of silver and shotguns.”
Praise God and pass the ammunition, brother.
The problems in the startup ecosystem are outside the control of entrepreneurs and employees -- it's related to monetary policy and political dysfunction. Problems in VC, downstream from even larger problems in legacy political structures. That political decisions made free $$$$ available to investors to shove $$$ towards useless products to pay $$ to employees to create such useless products is not the fault of the people at the bottom of that stream.
Blaming the little guy is trivial. Blaming the big guys (many of whom have been dead for a century) is not as cathartic or as risk-free.
For example, something as simple as the Google PDF viewer: it took me forever to figure out how to save the file. There are no visual cues whatsoever to tell you how to save the PDF. Maybe it's "cooler" but this is something that you need to figure out to mouse over the bottom right corner and these buttons magically appear. I thought we were done with stupid UX decisions like this back in the 90s.
The same goes for Windows 8. I've been using Windows since 3.1, and I tried using Windows 8 for a good hour, before I gave up. There are too many things that are completely nonsensical and need explanation. It's enough to make me switch away from Windows entirely. How this atrocity could have gone through the entire Microsoft org without getting canned before launch is a testament to how broken that company is.
The opposite is iOS. I really don't like using Mac OS (I wiped off Mac OS from my company Mac laptop and installed Windows 7 on it to be more productive), but iOS can be learned by an infant, I've seen it with my own eyes. That's a testament to great design, because it's so intuitive that someone who wasn't alive 18 months ago can figure out how to use it.
And UX design is only about making things easy to use. If they're not,the design is an utter 100% failure.
See: Windows 8, Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity.
Go to Notes. Everything is clickable. Click back to Accounts. Now everything except "Accounts" is clickable. Why? How are you supposed to know? Go to the Phone App, pick a contact, The name shows up with the contact's info. Everything on the screen is clickable except the contact's name? Why? How am I supposed to make the distinction?
I know there are better examples but I just clicked the first 2 built in apps I saw.
His confusion probably stems from the assumption that great visual designers will become or should become great product designers. He's seeing beautiful products fail, and worried because the visual designers weren't solving important problems for users. But why would they be? They're visual designers.
His way of evaluating design doesn't make a lot of sense either. Facebook may be fine with Paper's performance if it is intended as a platform where they can experiment without disrupting the experience for most users. Carousel's engagement numbers probably have less to do with the design than the fact that it's hard to get users off of other photo management apps that they already use.
Clarke's Third Law, that good technology is indistinguishable from magic, is apropos in almost any discussion that touches on the osmosis between technical staff and laymen. The laypeople have seen Apple's meteoric rise and heard it attributed to "design", so they think they need a "designer". But Apple didn't get where they are just by hiring random designers. They got where they are by building an entire system that was centered around the vociferous pursuit of a few simple principles. Apple is Apple because they've inextricably ingrained these principles into the corporate DNA. Apple is Apple because they know that "vision" is only a minor part in good industrial design, and because everyone in the company is committed to developing products that exceed expectations along all axes, through art, code, analytics, and other major disciplines.
Laypeople see Apple's attitude and success and think they just need to hire another plucky, divisive guy with an artsy feel to replicate it. They don't understand the work. To them, it's all magic, and anyone with a convincing robe and wizard hat is equally competent.
how old are you?
I really feel we need a new Bauhaus school for digital objects. Or at least another Loos running around yelling about ornamentation interactions are crimes ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime)
The plan then turns into "I'll test once it's live, once I have actual usage data". But, testing never occurs, and instead, your product team is faced with scope creep. You (or your stakeholders) think that a product is failing because you haven't jammed enough into it already, so go ahead and jam more features into it. Build all the things!
The cycle then repeats until the product is pronounced dead. sometimes on arrival, sometimes many months or years later.
So, the sooner product creators, designers, and developers let go of the fear of testing, the sooner a team can arrive at a product market fit.
I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly almost never bats first.
In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that you pay attention to what he states in that talk.
[1] http://interaction14.ixda.org/program/friday/517-the-de-inte...
To the extent that the executive-level perception of design's contribution to the success of an enterprise is important, then yes, for sure: we should all make sure that the investments we make in design are substantive and focused on supporting the overall utility of what we are doing, and don't create a perception of wasted resources.
But he (to my mind) basically runs down and says that Carousel is mostly redundant in the existing photo management marketplace and hasn't had good traction; Paper is mostly redundant to Facebook's own existing app and can't find traction; and Jelly is fundamentally off target in its premise and doesn't have traction. The fact that all three had significant investments in design, and tried to showcase that investment to users, does nothing to implicate design in their failures or invalidate design's status as an essential focus for businesses.
It's a thoughtful and interesting article, but after a first reading I just don't think it holds up beyond the author's anxiety on behalf of the discipline, and/or sense of missed opportunities for talented designers to have some high profile hits.