
The Dribbblisation of Design - tmlee
https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-dribbblisation-of-design-406422ccb026#.urul8bvil
======
rkalfane
(Disclaimer: I'm a designer and I'm probably very biased about the matter)

In my opinion it's very often a matter of expectations.

When a lot of design decisions are taken by a bunch of people, from
management, engineering and marketing, including a designer would simply mean
having one more person to compromise with. Companies working this way tend to
have designers focus more on making the product look good, thus this
dribbblisation of design. On the other side, engineering has historically been
expected to deal with design when building products, and nowadays a lot of
engineers have learnt how to design on the field. This reinforces the view
that designers are only useful to make things look good. Lastly, the tools we
use in design are really easy to use, anyone with a couple hours to spare
should be able to create some stuff with most of the available tools. With
that, it makes deciders think that the only difference will be a matter of
taste.

A lot of designers can actually do more than that, the basis of their job is
usually to question things with the perspective of the user: "Does it make
sense to do this? Is it really useful to have that amount of customisation?
How much information do we need to see?" Most of the time the solutions are
stupidly obvious, or they're chosen based of how complicated it makes the
system, or how costly it can be, and that's where experts add a lot of value.

All in all, if all you need is to make stuff look good, sure a dribbble
designer is probably a good fit, just don't expect them to automagically make
the product usable. If you want someone to work on your experience, you should
probably have your designer work on the problem instead of having them
"upgrade" your solution.

Just like how the engineering field is, the design field is really diverse
with people doing different things, differently.

(Wow, that was a long rant, sorry about that.)

~~~
seanmcdirmid
This. I'm not a designer, but my wife is (we met in a design studio I was
prototyping for). We were just having this conversation yesterday about how
design is "appreciated" in her company, basically going through every point
you listed above. It takes a huge cultural change in a company to make
something better than "design by engineer" desirable. Many companies want jack
of all trade generalists who can code a bit and design a bit, meaning they can
be reassigned easily enough to where the work happens to be at the moment. But
at the end of the day, it's all mediocre output (though sadly, it is
considered acceptable).

And then anyone who plays around with photoshop or illustrator for a few days
seems to think they are ready for a visual design career (and interaction
design is worse!). Who needs design school? So people encounter so many bad
poorly trained and experienced designers that their expectations of the
profession begin to be lowered. It is frustrating for those who actually went
through hard work to become skilled and experienced UXDs.

I'm personally a PL designer and see the same issues in our field (well, it is
very niche, and anyone who can write a compiler wants to design a
language....).

------
dunkelheit
My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are
getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works
great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy
to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual
information are on the screen.

Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as
misguided thinking that the designer knows my problems better than myself.
Take "you should take your umbrella" weather app. The information density is
exactly 1 bit per screen which is abysmal. What about my jacket? Or what if I
want to play badminton? Just give me the temperatures and wind info dammit.

~~~
petewailes
This is exactly the point. Your problem isn't the fonts or spacing, but the
focus on prettiness to the detriment of usefulness.

There is always a balance between the two. There's room between the pain that
is design without consideration of the information and the user, and
information accessibility with no consideration for visual aesthetic.

~~~
dunkelheit
I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. As an example of what I am
talking about - one of the internal apps at my workplace recently got a visual
overhaul. The functionality is exactly the same. The previous version also had
a designer working on it and he too tried to make the thing beautiful
(according to what was fashionable then). But because the new version is made
according to the current fashion so much less information fits on the screen.
I suspect the same thing will happen if someone tries to fit the application
into current UX paradigm of dumbing down the interaction.

~~~
petewailes
Then the designer hasn't done his/her job. It should start with an
understanding of what the user should be able to do. The story of the user
interaction for every screen is vital. Without it, you end up with what you've
described - something that may well be beautiful, but is deeply annoying to
use.

~~~
karmelapple
And although the design doesn't display as much information, what are the
needs for thi tool? Could some of the previously displayed information simply
not truly be useful anymore? Was it adding visual noise and distracting from
the main purpose of the visualization?

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vonklaus
_The Mediumization of Writing_

More and more people want to have an opinion and they use medium to share it
with the world. This is killing my narrow view of content creation because I
am able to asess every single users motivation. With such clarity, I have
determined they are, like me, all experienced professionals with 10 years
experience putting their best work forward. Have you seen the comments
section? People who don't have a masters in literature from Columbia are
actually displaying positive sentiment about this trash. This industry is dead
because medium, and other blogging platforms, exist and it is much easier to
create and piblish content. People are doing this as a hobby, or semi
professionally and I don't like it.

Edit: </satire>

~~~
d23
If you have to type </satire> it's probably not good satire.

After only a few paragraphs in, it became obvious that you've set up a one-
paragraph strawman. His point is that the process of _design_ is being traded
and mistaken for _making things look pretty_. Seems like a reasonable
argument.

------
tatx
Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more
fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely
listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions
being taken by someone higher up in management?

Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of
consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder
therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big
opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better
designers to the forefront of product development.

But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where
design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent
right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and,
not only that, do it better that everybody else.

~~~
dunkelheit
Proposing fundamental product changes takes solid grasp of what is called
"product architecture" in the article, i.e. precise understanding of the
concepts involved and the intricacies of their interaction. That means
becoming a domain expert, knowing how to work with analytics and maybe even
having a basic understanding of backend architecture. Most of the designers I
have worked with (admittedly a very small sample) were content with muddled
understanding from the point of view of casual user and so mostly drew pretty
pictures.

~~~
tmlee
I would agree. It gets difficult sometimes to implement a design from a
beautiful looking mockup. Mainly because the design does not take into account
most of the software use-cases. Then we go back to the drawing board again.

Which is sort of why I think designer who can implement design (in HTML/CSS/JS
or iOS/Android) is ideal, as they are much more likely to have that sort of
"product architecture" thought process; and being as closed as possible to the
code which means it becomes easier to adapt the design.

Personally like Ryan Singer's approach to designing as he jumps back and
fourth between HTML and Photoshop
([https://vimeo.com/16814487](https://vimeo.com/16814487)), the design gets
much closer to reality.

~~~
corinrules
Specialisation vs generalisation though...

------
Kapura
This sort of flash-over-substance internet feedback loop has cropped up in a
number of different arenas. Five years back or so I was on the staff of a
website that was created primarily to promote Halo multiplayer maps, to
receive feedback, and to feature the talented creators in the community.

A great deal of excellent maps went through the site, but I became
increasingly upset over what I saw as a shift towards presentation-over-
substance with the original posts. If you wanted people to play a map, it soon
became all but required to have a massive original post, with screenshots and
"action shots" and flashy headers to catch people's attention. The focus
became more on these OPs than the maps themselves. There was a movement
towards standardising the process to reduce the flashy bloat, but it was
unable to affect the changes I perceived as necessary, so I ended up leaving
the community.

How can issues like these be fixed? Can they be fixed, or is it just a bug in
the human code that superficial beauty halo effects everything else out of
consideration? Perhaps communities of a certain size eventually reduce to a
certain lowest common denominator appeal. I'm not certain.

~~~
jschwartzi
PG had the same worries about HN.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

In general, as long as the community continues to value substance and the
principle of the most charitable interpretation, it will survive. When we
start seeing memes and catfights, that's a sign the community is dying.

------
weixiyen
This article compares a _community_ of Visual Designers (the ones you find on
Dribbble) with 2 specific UX _people_.

A better comparison would be Dribbble vs IXDA, community vs community, one
with the focus on form vs the other with focus on function.

If you look at it that way, the signal to noise ratio is honestly about the
same in each community. A couple gems here and there, but 90% of the stuff I
see or read on both don't seem to be solving anything.

------
nirmel
I think of dribbble designers as who you hire when you know what the thing is
going to do and how it's going to be organized. All else equal, I think
there's something to be said about a product looking good. Hiring a painter to
build your house makes no sense, but hiring a painter to paint your house does
make sense.

------
petewailes
Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead...

I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to
unpack some context first.

I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming
and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how
they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done.
Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into
media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by
marketing.

At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of
marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved
in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in
business.

Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of
design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more
generally.

Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management;
people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could
talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills.
People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.

Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one
where representatives from various departments get together to decide on
things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and
design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution.
Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.

I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where
one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms
of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful
and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs
to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is
in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to
implement suggestions raised.

There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding
cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in
the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams
with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly
required.

~~~
paulojreis
> I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on
> where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the
> realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made
> beautiful and usable by designers.

I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making
it usable (and _beautiful_ , as you call it) is way below conceiving the
product, in a true designer perspective. Software people don't like to admit
it, but designers are much more prepared and educated to conceive a product
for _humans_ than engineers or managers.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
No, I think in many projects designers _are_ decorators - which leaves no one
in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user.

In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how
someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a
trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point
themselves in the place of a naive user.

Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The
testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business
with a web site that sells to customers, this is _at least_ as important as
unit tests in code.

IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't
get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for
driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social
proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to
make the customer experience more positive.

The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a
logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply
didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't
been tested properly, and many elements were broken.

Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.

~~~
paulojreis
> No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one
> in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user.

I agree. That's my experience in this industry, and in big projects. Designers
are hired to make things look pretty.

> In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how
> someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a
> trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to
> point themselves in the place of a naive user.

... but with this I can't agree. It's not a reasonable comparison. The full-
stack Linux expert won't understand the user mostly because it's not his job
to do so. He doesn't have the knowledge and methodology to get to know and
understand the user (as well as his context). The UX expert, on the other
hand, should be trained specifically to do this in the most systematic and
unbiased way possible. He doesn't need exactly to _role-play_ the user
(frankly, I don't like this conception of UX, but that's a pet peeve), but he
should know and understand him. It's not "I think the user will like this",
it's "I know users want this".

> Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The
> testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made.

And in this we fully agree again. All the knowledge the UX expert can harness
about the user and his context should be validated, as early as possible.

------
jib
The weather app example at the start annoys me. I want a weather app for data,
not decision making. I want to consume a couple of data points easily, for
various needs. 7 of those 8 apps do that.

Rain amount (bike or bus today?) Wind amount (can I bodyboard today? Rain coat
or umbrella?) Temperature (gloves for the wetsuit? Jacket when biking?) Sun
amount (can I do a cliff walk this weekend or will the trail be muddy?)

Etc... I don't want an umbrella app, a surf app, a walk app, a bike app... I
just want some data that I will use in a multitude of ways.

------
rrrx3
My 2 cents, as a former visual designer, now senior UX designer - Dribbble is
a place where lots of pretty baubles are on display, where flash is valued
over process, and where it's very hard to get a sense of anything other than
the showcased designer's visual acumen.

When I'm interviewing a designer, I don't take it as a positive or negative
that they have a dribbble account. If they're interviewing for a position that
is primarily visual design, I will peruse their stuff there just to get a
sense of their style and capability, but not as a final deterministic factor
on their hireability.

Dribbble was never really meant to be a place where people showcased their
process, just a place where they could throw out a quick snippet to get
reactions. Visual designers find that extremely helpful. If you're not versed
in the ideas of typography, color theory, moodboarding, concepting, or any of
the other methodologies and tools in a visual designer's wheelhouse, then
looking from the outside in at Dribbble can make it seem like a world filled
with trite, inefficient, fantastical non-reality.

You're not alone in this. Even I, as a former visual designer, have to tell
myself that when I go clicking through Dribbble. It's not a place to showcase
fully-polished, finished products - it's not a product marketing site. It's
not a place to showcase the messy process of product design - it's not a
portfolio site. It's a place where people can toss out ideas and get feedback
on the micro-points of it. The colors, they typography, the alignment. Start
to expect anything more and the model of the entire site falls apart.

For better or worse, Dribbble is not built to scale as a place for the
critique of the entire design process. I think that's where this article gets
it wrong. There are plenty of things to critique the site for - the lack of
real meaningful engagement, for example, or the highly exclusive invite-only
nature, for another - but fundamentally the OPs of this article are projecting
thoughts and ideas about what they think/want Dribble to be vs what it
actually is.

TL; DR: Dribbble is a place to showcase digital visual art and design
artifacts, not a meaningful UX or UI portfolio catalogue.

------
rchaud
I don't know about this. I think it's wholly possible that people derive
inspiration and perspective from Dribbble, Behance and similar sites, and use
that inspiration to attempt to solve actual business problems in UI/UX, the
specifics of which are never posted to Dribbble, either due to NDAs or more
likely, because it would be incredibly boring for the average Dribbble user to
look at.

I don't believe Dribbble has portrayed itself as a site to showcase business
case studies. A lot of the time, it's simply a repository of design samples or
off-work personal projects. And I'll admit, after a long day of looking at
dull wireframes, it's simply a relief to look at a fun UI mockup animation,
even if it might not work in a real-life production app.

------
metaphorical
The idea "form follows function" (or mission or vision) is as old as modernism
itself. Its linear approach, from "vision" down to "visual", neglects an
important aspect of design process that is dynamic in essence. Often
interaction design redefines a product's core function, or a visual design so
beautiful that it becomes an integral part of a product's vision. I'm not
convinced that product/design process has to be like a waterfall or a tree or
a loop. It can be more like a web too.

These days I've reviewed so many portfolios with post-it notes and hand-drawn
flow diagrams. Don't they look all the same like dribbble too? Don't they all
tell the same story, over and over?

------
percept
I find the article's tone overly dismissive, and prefer to think of Dribbble
as a GitHub for designers: a place to show off, discuss and hone their craft,
and seek inspiration.

------
theodorton
This seems like a recurring topic:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dribblization&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dribblization&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
PMan74
8 of those are the same article?

------
ryanSrich
This should have 2014 in the title. This article has been discussed several
times.

