Design Still Matters

I have been frustrated with the state of design in technology. It is not a recent development, one which has amplified–not incidentally–as design gets increasingly ingrained in the software development process. Design is getting less crucial as it is getting more prevalent.

This manifests in a few common ways: design gets looped in late to touch up predetermined ideas; designs get sharply curtailed by engineering costs¹; design systems ²; worse, becoming a cudgel for applying (dark) patterns to solve funnel problems. All these reflect the comfortable groove that design has settled into, that is interesting enough work, floor raising, and non threatening.

The good news is these are all signs of the design profession maturing in the software industry, the three legged stool and all that. Design is now part of the software delivery process! At the same time, software feels increasingly less designed. There is an increasing sameness to everything that sometimes betrays its lack of thought. Is the result of more design less design, or a conformity to a common view of design?

This feels extra frustrating because I am still a believer in design pushing boundaries. The promise that a human-centered process can design outcomes that are greater than the sum of its whole. The promise that designed products lead to tangible improvements to the human condition.

What is Design

Design can mean many things to many people, so let me put a definition to it. In my words, Design is the deliberate arrangement of materials with concerns over time in order to achieve a desired outcome for people involved. Materials in software is typically technological in nature, and can refer to screens, gadgets, voice agents, etc. Concerns are primarily human concerns such as needs and wants, sociocultural, time and place, things that designers inquire into. The deliberate arrangement is the act itself, for neither the technological nor the human piece can exist in a vacuum, and specifically this deliberation considers how they interact with each other. Over time acknowledges that the introduction of new technology changes the equilibrium of the ecosystem which may necessitate more design iterations. Lastly, all acts of design places humans in the center of them. In other words, design is not and cannot be ethically neutral.

In practice, this breaks down into specific skill sets–UX, UI, usability, research–that are well integrated into the software development process today. However, just as using software does not make one a technology company, a lot of technology are not designed because they are not created with the holistic design perspective.

Why Design matters

It can be instructive to examine what happens when technology is made without the design perspective. Just as the original Danish word for design means form giving³, and building technology by most accounts is giving a form to processes and ideas. Therefore they must have a form and ultimately have a design. Without an explicit design process, the resulting constructs take on the default perspective of the project. A hardware and software solution often takes on the technical perspective – exposing the technical behavior and inside workings of their components. Not uncommonly, projects are subjected to their financial perspective where intangible attributes are discarded to satisfy budgetary considerations. In the worst case, the project takes on the bureaucratic perspective, where it gets subjugated to the priorities of divisions and factions inside organizations. We see this around us all the time. Projects built with big budgets and fanfare that end up with little to show for. These products and services are hard to use, with an obvious lack of thought for the people at the center of it, and becomes and over funded elephant in the room.

The design perspective asks this question: what is the right thing for our users⁴ that we should build? This question places the people, customers, constituents, partners, at the center of the project. Then this perspective takes into account the other concerns, be it technical, financial, or bureaucratic, so that the project can be successfully delivered. The ordering here is important. It doesn’t mean that we blow up the budget or resist coordinating with other teams. It means that tradeoffs get made with design in mind and decided on the basis of benefit to the user.

This change in priority when building technology maximizes the chances of the project being successful⁵. Good design builds good products that people love. This is the central promise of this design perspective that elevates it above all others.

Moreover, the benefits of good design extends beyond the current. Time is an underrated and often neglected part of applying design. As a natural consequence of placing people in the center of inquiry, designed technology finds problem spaces to fill in from the people that they are serving. Colloquially, people finds better uses for useful things. Systems are rarely static. By introducing well designed technology into one it creates positive impacts whether be it productivity, efficiency or delight, and the ripple effect of that creates new opportunities for our purveyor.

Sensitivity is a key attribute of a good design practice. Designers are responsive to systemic changes because they understand that solutions are always anchored to specific conditions and points in time. Either solutions move, or environments change, typically gradually and then suddenly. Funnily, businesses are often obsessed with finding moats when a good design is as straightforward and as good as any. A design practice creates a consistent probe that builds up a longitudinal and deep understanding of the ecosystems that is difficult to overcome. Advantages are created not only during the initial rollout but sustained and compounded over time.

Good design is confident. Because good design is grounded in and guided by the people and the reality that it operates in, it does away with cloning competitive features and getting teared apart by competing assumptions and narratives. In a way, design is a communication technology. It has to be a continuous dialog between the creators, subjects and environment. The organizational delivery of the designed good is constantly learning, calibrating, evaluating and improving the effectiveness of their design. As long as you understand who and why you are serving them, it will resonate and be reciprocated.

Think of all the products that are considered well designed. There is an always a timelessness quality to them which is greater than its aesthetics, utility, or materials. Because it knows what it wants to be and what it can do, it can push boundaries and create better futures. That is what good, applied design can do.

Design as Culture

People often think of design as a vocation but that’s only part of the picture. In my opinion, this is often where the discussion starts go out the window⁶, as in am I saying that designers do not matter or that everyone can design? At this point, definitions start getting fuzzy and everything goes.

Let me try to put a straight answer here: no, and yes. Design is both a vocational practice and a cultural one. People who practice design vocationally are trained on how to think designerly and apply designerly methods. To fully realize the design perspective and ship designed technology products, design has to be integrated into the culture, the methods and the behaviors, led sometimes by people with the title “designer” and often by people who are design pilled.

This expansion from function to culture is crucial⁷ because only in culture the priorities of the organization is reflected it. Organizations need to explicitly consider the people and outcomes they want to happen. When left vacant, it does not become under-designed, rather, all the unspoken assumptions take over. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial here, when an organization does not take design seriously, it is difficult to ship a well designed product.

As a result, to do all the things that organizations say they want to do –innovate, break boundaries, blaze new paths, create durable product categories– they have no other choice but embrace design as a core cultural value. We all know good culture is advantageous. When everyone up and down the organization is aligned on thinking about how to best solve the customer’s problems, then the inevitable outcome is good design. Good design is good culture!

What’s next

If you’ve followed the discourse in the design sphere for a while, you’ll find that very little of what I’m saying here is new. So why am I saying this at all?

First of all, I wanted to put my pent-up emotions into words and at the same time reaffirm my own belief in the virtues of design. I want to clearly articulate why I believe this world view is still productive and beneficial in the realm of technological innovation.

Next, I want to put in a voice for design in the current intellectual climate. In a world dominated by Moneyball style analytics⁸ or post ZIRP malaise, design can feel like a highfalutin touchy feely endeavor. It’s not–and I attempt to explain why design is in line and a better option for all the things that we say we want as an industry. I don’t believe that design is the only thing that produces good products, but it is definitely underrepresented and underrated right now.

Finally, I want to invigorate designers to assert themselves right now. We are in a time where we are seeing rampant AI-driven innovation and my feeling is that designers have remarkably little to say about it. There is much about the current crop of LLM-based technologies that do not fit naturally with the GUI paradigm that the design vocation is so comfortable in, so I understand, but the silence is deafening. We talk about design being stewards of productive and useful innovation and I firmly believe that we are able to create innovation from perspectives that are different–usefully different–than the tech driven one.

A world without an evolved design practice is a less sophisticated one. My hope is we find our footing, push the practice forward and continue to serve the greater project of delivering excellent software and services.