

Your Customers Care About Design, Even if They Don't - wmeredith
http://www.voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/04/your-customers-care-about-design-even-if-they-dont/
Trying my hand at some corporate blogging for my new company. (Design/SEM House) This is my first article.<p>Excerpt:
"So, why is such a silly mistake so common? It has to do with vocabulary. Even people who don’t care about design, care about it. They just think they don’t care, because they don’t know the language. They don’t take note of poorly thought out ergonomics when they encounter them, but they sure recognize it when they’ve purchased a product the maker clearly never used for it’s intended purpose. When they feel they’ve wasted money, they certainly do take note. And they tell their friends."
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dcurtis
I call myself an interface designer. But I don't consider what I do purely
visual at all. I find that it's hard to describe. How do you describe to
someone the feeling you get when you put your tongue on a lemon? Or how it
feels to click the "next page" button on newspond.com?

Design is not how it looks, how it feels, or how it works. It's all of those
things, together-- it's the experience. On the web, it's the way a layout
makes you feel on a subconscious, visceral level and how the buttons and
interactive elements literally feel when you click them. On a more tangible
level, it's the way the volume knob on a stereo feels stiff when you change
the volume, or how a nice doorknob makes a thump-click when you close it.

There's no way to "design" an amazing product if you don't consider everything
at the very beginning. On the web, there are three things to consider: visual
design, interface architecture, and underlying technology (an analogy would be
the tires and color of the exterior, the safety features and interior design,
and the engine of a car). If you skimp on any of these three things, your
product will seriously suffer. Do you own a Chevy Nova or a Dodge Neon? Of
course not. Both of those cars were built by sacrificing visual design and
safety features for cheapness.

There's a philosophy of rapidly developing, rapidly releasing, and then
rapidly iterating. I think a lot of companies take this too literally and
rapidly build everything half-assed, rapidly release half-assed products, and
then rapidly iterate half-assed features without ever going back and fixing
their half-assed first revision. I think a better process is to design an easy
to use, awesome version 1 with the simplest, most necessary features first,
then iterate based on that level of quality. At that point, you've set a bar
of quality that you simply have to achieve with every release.

To summarize, don't skimp on designers or hackers. Skimp on features. Features
are free, and can always be added later.

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daniel-cussen
_When it comes to cost cutting, many times it’s design or marketing that goes
first. This is like an applicant ditching the cover letter on their resume
when the job market is down: it’s laughably bad timing._

I'm so, so sick of this kind of post. Some design guy thinks design guys are
not well treated. OK, sure, maybe, why not. Then the guy goes on to say how
design is everything. Sometimes the design guy disses the hacker for skimping
for a few hundred on design. Other times the design guy insults the hacker's
taste.

"Design" is not the only part of the business where you design things. In
product development you design too. The "design" branch is the one concerned
with the design of things that don't change the function of your product, just
the appearance. It's makeup. Design, as a verb, is important, but what this
guy is talking about, "design" as a branch of business, is really exactly the
first place to skimp.

Not that skimping in this area will not have its costs. The reason you have to
cut costs to begin with implies cutting something that you may need. If you
have been running a tight ship, anything you cut will hurt somewhat. It's like
starving. After a while, your body starts consuming parts of your organs. It
consumes developed skeletal muscles preferentially. Sure they're important --
they wouldn't be there in the first place if they weren't -- but they aren't
your liver. You won't die from having your muscles catabolized. People often
talk about the other branches and go back and forth over which matters most.
"The market is everything." "No, the product -- the product matters the most."
I feel these discussions sometimes omit the fact that many areas can be
necessary, just like you need several organs to survive. Is your liver more
important than your heart? A moot point. You need a market, you need a
product, you need to monetize eventually. You can argue that any one of these
is essential, and you'd be right. But design? Design is the appendix of a
startup. At best, it is the second kidney. Nobody cares what your logo looks
like. Nobody cares about the favicon. The buttons don't need to be 2.0. None
of these things are very important, and worse, they're not even that hard to
do. Making a passable favicon is not that hard, and you can always pimp it
if/when you have tons of VC money.

~~~
rantfoil
> The "design" branch is the one concerned with the design of things that
> don't change the function of your product, just the appearance. It's makeup.

This is where you are pointing out a big problem in most organizations. Design
in many organizations is treated as purely visual, when it really shouldn't
be. If this is the role of design in your organization, then yes, absolutely,
it is expendable. Lipstick.

But you don't want lipstick. There's also interaction design / product design.
You want someone who can, BEFORE a person even puts a line of code down,
understand what the user wants to do and make sure the user experience makes
sense in that context, through real user testing and rapid iteration. It's
just cheaper to think and change on paper or a whiteboard. Once it's
implemented, it is very costly to change. This type of design is not lipstick.
It is the process by which a product takes shape... and it is not expendable.

~~~
daniel-cussen
We're talking about different things. The article talks about selling cereal
boxes. That's expendable, or at least less vital than other things.

In a more general sense, design has its purpose, no question. How do you make
something without designing it? Sure design is a big part of making a product,
and is the heart of any business. But the article talks about lipstick.

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nazgulnarsil
My design mantra is: make it easier for the user to go to the next step than
it is to for the user to go goof off on reddit.

using this, i work from the bottom up. I find which part of the user
experience is the most boring and try to improve that until it isn't the most
boring part. then repeat.

------
dbreunig
Design is function, at its base. Even no design, is a design choice.

------
brlewis
You can read about my own enlightenment on this issue here, starting with the
2nd paragraph:

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12>

------
DaniFong
I'd really like to see that Peer Insight study.

~~~
wanorris
I'm extremely curious about the methodology, even more than the results. The
kind of distinction they draw seems very difficult to capture in an objective
study.

~~~
lg
<http://www.tekes.fi/eng/publications/innovative_service.pdf>

i'm not sure if this is the paper, but this one explains what they mean by
"customer experience design". the little table on page 12 mentions radical
innovations like making something that your customers actually want, focusing
on the "customer journey", talking about "brand attributes", and
"storytelling." i think that all means "show your customer why they should
want your product," and i'm not sure worrying about kerning is all that
critical to it. can't hurt though.

