
Ask HN: Is there anything you would like to learn about design? - jasonli
Hey everyone,<p>I&#x27;m a designer who runs a small studio.<p>I&#x27;m thinking about starting a blog series about &quot;design for non-designers&quot;. Would love to hear your thoughts on anything you would like to learn regarding design. This doesn&#x27;t have to be technical, it can be things like &quot;When to hire a designer&quot;, &quot;How to brief designers&quot;. I&#x27;ll do a follow-up if this picks up and I write about it.
======
PKalusek
As a Software Developer with no experience in UX and UI I would love to know
more about that particular topic. At my current workplace we don't have any
designers, so it's my job to make good looking interfaces and I have sometimes
trouble to make the right decision about arrangement of input fields etc.
Something like the following blog post, is what helps me a lot:
[https://goo.gl/aWQSkv](https://goo.gl/aWQSkv)

------
mlthoughts2018
Design is a very broad topic. When I read the title, I thought it meant
software system design, whether for backend or front-end or scientific
computing or any other domain.

As a person who cares a lot about taking a craftsmanship-first approach to
business software, and in fact I believe this for cost-effectiveness and
speed-of-delivery reasons such as discussed in _Peopleware_ , my biggest
question about design is:

How do you get product managers, business managers and executives to
understand that by caring sincerely about first-principles craftsmanship and
design and by creating policies in which managers and executives give up their
ability to supersede craftsmanship with short-term or reactionary thinking,
the business outcomes and customer satisfaction, even in the short term, are
likely to be better, and especially compounded over time?

I'm not saying to take an ivory tower approach and try to build a "perfect"
system before you ever start testing it in the market or analyzing how
customers react to it.

But I am talking about the way that important work for the sake of
extensibility and maintainability, or important aesthetic judgments from
engineers who have experience with what features succeed in businesses, often
get superseded for poorly thought out and reactionary short-term business
goals, leading to wasted effort when sprint work gets deprioritized midweek
and everyone has to pivot onto poorly articulated new goals all of a sudden
(and then it happens again two weeks later, and again, and again).

If management took a constrained design approach, and bought into the idea
that engineering aesthetics are a legitimate reason for teams to turn around
and say 'no' when they are asked to engage in an obviously dumb pivot that
wastes resources on unfinished work and context switches, I believe the
evidence (written about widely, e.g. even just start by reading _Peopleware_ )
shows it would lead to better results _even in terms of the outcomes that the
managers and executives want._

Overall it makes me feel like other questions about design are just not
important unless you work for bosses who happen to "just get it" and think in
this quality-oriented way. Otherwise, you can learn all kinds of cool things
about design ideas, you can hire great people to advise on prototypes and
design approaches, and it all just goes in the trash can because of short
term, reactionary management practices.

~~~
jasonli
Yup, purposely kept it broad but maybe TOO broad. You bring up a good question
and frankly, I don't think theres a single answer to that. Let me think more
about it...perhaps it can be broken down into steps.

