Why Products Suck #1: Arbitrary Decisions
The first in an ongoing series of posts about why the products we use suck.
Arbitrary decisions are the death of good design, especially when they are made by someone outside the product team. With rare exceptions, the pet feature(s) of the CEO, VP of Marketing, or Director of Technology will often do more to clutter and confuse a design than improve it.
Making choices because they’ve “worked before” or “that’s how everyone does it,” “because our competitors do it,” or, worst of all, “because I like it this way” is simply sloppy design work and leads to products that suck. All decisions should be made with an eye towards meeting user or business needs. Finding out what those needs are, creating design principles around them, and ruthlessly sticking to them are essential to creating world-class products.
This is not to suggest that experienced designers shouldn’t use tools/styles/tricks that have worked before; that would be ridiculous. But a judicious use of previous choices that is grounded on the current project at hand and the product’s known context of use is what is called for. Don’t use Garamond 3 or lavender or a slider only because you like it. What effect are you trying to achieve? What will be gained by the user (or by the business) from that particular choice?
When someone makes an arbitrary decision, try to figure out (or simply ask) them what problem they are trying to solve and why they think that solution is the right one. Often this will allow you to get to the root of the issue, and perhaps even reframe it so that a solution can be found that makes sense, can be objectively justified (perhaps through design research), and that meets the design principles.
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3 Comments
I think there is a difference between a tool or a trick that has worked in the past and a genuine pattern of form for a given context, but I think it pays to develop a standard litmus test all style decisions must pass, no matter who they come from. That entails discipline on the part of the designer as well as courage not to appease the VP’s cornflower blue bias. I think it is reasonable to codify that discipline both into the contract and into the design toolkit.
It’s reasonable to be biased toward past success, as well as toward a mammoth set of micro-decisions we could call style, but I believe the ability to recognize when doing so compromises a result entails a certain amount of training, which I think can be accomplished as a byproduct of a certain discipline within the process of design.
I have found a scaffold of some sort to be eminently necessary to contain information I have gathered about the context and to enable me to point to any decision made in the form and explain why it is so. Moreover such a structure is resistant to arbitrary decisions because it causes them to dangle, both conspicuously and precariously.
There’s a good article on Johnny Holland today about organizational psychology. It’s interesting to understand *why* the “it’s how we always have done it” argument is used so often, it’s often not because of laziness or lack of creativity. It’s far more often because there are organizational biases or assumptions that are reflected in it; saying “it’s how we’ve always done it” is actually a way to demonstrate to peers and stakeholders a knowledge of an org’s history and language. In other words, it’s a way someone demonstrates group solidarity, which is a very hard thing to overcome.
If your CEO, VP of Marketing, or Director of Technology doesn’t understand their customers and/or their business needs, then you’re pretty much doomed anyway…
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[...] The CEO will say, “I’ll take that font, that color, and that material.” These arbitrary decisions, made without regard to the effect or the whole, can quickly make a product [...]