I’m not a designer by profession (but I play one on TV?). Nonetheless, I am painfully aware of how important it is in my field. Design (good and otherwise) touches on the majority of what I do professionally in one way or another. Developing successful software products for my particular industry requires an acute awareness of the user and designs that are strictly tailored towards their needs. Unfortunately, more often than not, what we produce has a design that either has very little thought applied to it, or strongly refers to the engineering team’s ideas of what a good user interface should look like (which is usually the look of their favorite geek tool at the time). Either way not much in the way of user-centered design is done.

Trying to be better at what I do, I’ve gotten a bit obsessed lately about educating myself on basic design concepts and have been browsing a lot of design-focused sites out there. As such, I’ve had Eric Karjaluoto’s article Fuck style on his website ideasonideas flagged and open in a tab in NetNewsWire for months now waiting to be read. This should be seen as a compliment, as I knew on skimming that this was a post I wanted to spend more time with…

Eric’s target is adherence and preference for style, particularly the style-du-jour, over focused user-centered design:

“This season we have “glowy” vector/bitmap collages and rather cute hand-drawn patterns. The following season will inevitably bring something equally novel on first sight, which we will quickly tire of as we are inundated by it. In the pre-web world, things rolled-out more slowly, and as such didn’t hit with the same force; however, better distribution systems allow this eye-candy to be dispersed rapidly. As soon as a particular style is hot, legions of designers reverse-engineer the treatment, and imitate it until it’s everywhere.

The challenge here is that as we are bombarded by these styles, designers, by their own accord and that of their clients and peers, gravitate towards reiterating whatever the style-du-jour happens to be. (Think of the swoosh logos of the late 1990s.) It’s easy to do, the pay-off is immediate, and for a short while, one’s portfolio seems deceptively strong. Most times though, this work is void of the research, strategy, and logic that are necessary to do something effective. As a result, it’s in fact a big pile of shiny bullshit.”

What drew me to this article is not that I have a lot of experience with the problem he describes. Though I’ve seen what he describes, I’m more likely to see a total lack of design input into a product than I am overly stylized design. The companies competing in my industry are by and large dominated by R&D, engineering and scientists (and of course the Finance people). These are the groups that come up with the product designs and this, of course, has the results you would expect. Even when external design companies are hired, generally the proposals for changes and improvements they make are very low on the list of priorities. Only slowly are design concepts making their way into what we do. I’m still amazed at the blank looks when a visual design concept is brought up in the context of software development discussion. By in large, design on this level is something totally alien to them.

However, the issue Eric describes applies easily not just to design in the way he’s thinking of it, but to programming as well. In this case it’s the shiny new tool, language or methodology rather than the hottest visual effect. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had colleagues say “Why don’t you rewrite it in .net/Java/Python/etc…?” when told I was working on some legacy product or another. They don’t say this because they think there is something specific to be gained from using their current favorite tool, they just think it’s cooler.

Shiny new things always attract, whether they’re the latest programming library or the latest web animation technique. This is more reflected on the inside of the product than the outside in my industry, but you also frequently see it in the user interfaces coming out of these groups. New user interface controls are frequently seen where they make no sense. These get used because they were shiny and new and the programmer couldn’t resist their lure. Or MacOSX style buttons suddenly appear in XP UI’s, or windows animate for no real reason… Maybe it’s not that style-du-jour doesn’t apply, it’s just that the people doing the applying of the style are different.

“We have to get our collective heads out of the sand. Everything we do must be held to a higher-standard. Perhaps we have to see design less like art (which is how I fear it is still classified by many), and more like engineering. The data and ability to measure results exists. We simply have to put hard analysis ahead of our personal impulses. This is a great opportunity for us as designers to make a leap. In doing so, we can earn a seat at the table and provide the unique kind of reasoning that our practice can afford.”

I absolutely agree with this. Design (and designers) are classified as somewhat frivolous and “artistic” in the engineering cultures that dominate the industry where I work. And agreed, this does have to change and maybe the approach of tackling design problems more like engineering is the way to go. But I also take a look around and think the inverse of this is also true. Software development and engineering also need to be held to a higher standard. On many levels what we do needs to perhaps be less like engineering and more like design. But this should be the kind of design Eric advocates, not the design by geek we currently utilize. This is design focused on achieving the goal of making something the user really wants to use. That does what they need to do. And that does it well. Not focused on making something the designer or programmer thinks is cool - we have more than enough of that kind of design already.

Geek //