The (un)Importance of Design

Quite a lot of importance is placed on design, specifically interface design, but what do we really think about design?

Building end-user software for more than a few years, I've heard my share of complaints, criticisms, and confusion around interface design - the most common being something like "why the **bleep** did they do that". Where's the problem, we think to ourselves, it's not like the solution - the way it should be - isn't right there in front of you. After all, we all know enough about good design that we know it when we see it, right? Besides, we reason with ourselves, don't they know that poor design will kill their product, and how hard can it be to follow the simple steps to good design?¹

Perhaps...or perhaps not.

I recall working for the first time with an Apple product in the mid-90's - a PowerPC. Overall a decent unit, but one where the power button was placed next to the floppy drive bay - in the exact spot a disk eject button would be on a DOS/Windows machine. They could have easily placed the button somewhere else -on the other side of the machine next to the cover for the installed hard disk, for instance. For people used to working with desktop PCs they didn't even have to think about what the button next to the drive door does. However, for those new Apple users it was quite a problem when the power was turned off with a non-boot disk in the drive.

On the flip side, what happens when the interface is rockin' on a bad product (Apple Maps, anyone)? The best interface in the world isn't going to help if you get completely lost.

I shouldn't pick on Apple alone - a person could get a reputation for doing that sort of thing...so I'll just mention a few others who have confused design with quality - products like the Dish Network² or the MyFord Touch³.

The reality is that we should have good design, not just because it's the cool thing, but also because it builds trust. Even though we were (or at least I was) taught to not judge a book by its cover, what people see matters. It's difficult to convince ourselves that an organization that can't deliver on something simple, like button placement, can deliver on something complicated, like an OS. On the flip side, in my experience leads me to believe that design is not nearly as important as it's claimed. People tend to be brand-loyal - in America, extremely so; in some cases, for example automobiles and operating systems, brand loyalty can reach near religious fervor.

We consumers, it seems, maintain our love-hate relationship with poorly-designed quality products and well-designed inferior products and complain, criticize, and vent our confusion...to people who aren't brand-loyal like we are. Therein lies the rub, because it's not those brand-loyal customers we're trying to keep, it's the new customers we're trying to get.

What's the conclusion, then? First, as we philosophers are fond of saying, there are two positions one might take on this issue: design isn't critically important because consumers are brand-loyal or design is critically important because of its effect on potential consumers. Second, think about the design of your product. Design is a piece of a larger whole, and some designs encourage us to create an inferior product,⁴ whether it's because of their complexity or the effort required to build them. Ideally we'll build products that are both quality products and have a rockin' design.

Notes:

1. Yes, there's likely to be an upcoming blog post about that topic.
2. When Good Design => Bad Product
3. A Confusing User Interface And Poor Usability Are Killing Ford’s Quality Ratings
4. Although the moto.oakley.com page won an award (Site of the Day from http://www.awwwards.com/) for its design, it is hardly an example of a superior, or even mediocre web page, weighing in at nearly 86M over its 450+ requests and lllloooonnnngggg loading time. You can read more about it at http://hawksworx.com/blog/oakleys-monster-page-of-baubles/, or try the site - it may still be up.