Comments on Fear of Design

Seth Gordon — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Am I afraid to place _my_ work out in the open for review, compliment, and complaint? Nope, not at all. As long as I am completely responsible for it.

But, when working on large projects, rarely is the work that I present my pure vision. When that’s the case, I am the spokesperson and whipping boy for what amounts to a team effort.
Even though I’m presenting the work, what’s on display is usually a compromise of my original vision, smeared with input from just about everywhere, including my own team members and client feedback. It is not uncommon for me to have to incorporate suggestions for reasons other than the fact that they improve the user experience.

Getting to a presentable IA/design is almost always a reconcilliation and a negotiation process.Just as I wouldn’t take full credit if everybody loved it, I don’t eagerly accept full-blame for any shortcomings (but for the sake of professionalism, I grin and bear it).

So, unless I become a one-person show or work in a vacuum, I don’t ever expect to have 100% control over my final deliverable – which means that on an internal and personal level, I won’t ever accept 100% responsibility for it.

George Olsen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Creation/evaluation—This parallels Scott Berkum’s argument about the need to both prove/disprove your design.

Whether it’s done by different people depends on the temperment of the people involved and the context.

In “traditional” graphic design, one of the things that elevates you to senior designer or art director is developing the ability to look dispassionately at your own designs, which is something that generally only comes through experience.

christina — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Thanks, Steve, for the distinction between *roles* and *people.* Information architecture is design, Usability (testing evaluating, etc) is evaluation. Usability people may design (though it may also lessen their famed objectivity) and Information Architects may evaluate (also potentially biased). Design is always “dangerous” and takes courage no matter who does it.

Also, please understand that when I say IA, I also wish to include all the structural design professions that may wish to hide behind a scientific objectivity, including Interaction design, interface design and information design. It’s all design.

Steve Mulder — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

I too agree that Usability is not about designing. It’s about validating designs.

The User Experience Group at Terra Lycos consists of both designers (IAs and visual designers) and usability specialists. We complement each other well. While we designers immerse ourselves in individual projects and work closely with product teams in their design process, the usability specialists can maintain an objectivity that is essential for validating our work. Usability brings key learnings into the process, and is involved throughout. The designers take those learnings, as well as other business and technical requirements, and create the best possible solution.

Of course, I’m speaking of roles here and not necessarily people. Usability specialists can also design when they’re actively applying their learnings.

Elmi van der Dussen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

The usability issue:

I found that often usability engineering is equited to a compliance audit. It might be the way it is sold and practiced. This might be a result of the emerging nature of this discipline, and opportunists climbing on the bandwagon after they’ve read three sets of guidelines.

To design (structure) an information space, or web space, and the nvaigation within this space, as well as the look-and-feel of ti, is multi-dimensional, and requires a combined skill-set. The most visible result is the look-and-feel – so graphic designers can sell themselves more easily as being required in the design process.

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

The Usability Issue:
Christina is right. I’m sorry I don’t know how you cut it, the heart and soul of Usability Engineering is to guide design, but not to design. They work with designers and they help them out, but in the end they are not designing. Their methods don’t employ a design process, but are much more analytically and data driven. This is a necessary piece of product development, it is invaluable, but it is NOT design.

Christina (and myself) might be alienating a group of people in the BIG ia world, but lets please focus people about what IA is and isn’t instead of trying to fit everywhere, especially in places that have long been filled by good people doing amazing work.

David Heller — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:15 GMT

Congrats Christina for kicking us in the butt a bit. I think one of the reasons we are afraid of the design, is b/c our work isn’t considered design.

I was just in one of those meetings with my boss telling him what I really want to do, and I said “I want to design. I’m sick of intuiting my wireframes. I want to use the design process to create informed designs.” Something that there is currently no time in the design process to do. Even when I was at an agency where I controlled the consulting gigs the best design process I was able to conjour was just doing wireframes.

How many of us out there are in positions where doing interfaces is just about doing it? How often do we supply a client 3 versions of wireframes? I would sit in awe at how the visual designers get 3 weeks to not even come up with a final product and I would work my ass off to finish wireframes at 50 wireframes in 2 days.

This mentality that interface design is a chore, and visual design is an artform is what we are fighting against.

Ralph Brandi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

I spent years feeling that the word “design” was so loaded that I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I took any number of circumlocutions to avoid the word; adopting the title “Web Architect” in 1996 was one of my early attempts to get across the idea that I create web sites without being associated with the baggage that the term “design” carries. I spent a lot of time considering fields that provided an analogous experience to what I was doing.

I had a conversation with Nick Ragouzis at CHI in 1998 about design. I denied that what I did was design, for exactly this reason. Call me a web architect, web cinematographer, webmaster, even a web engineer, anything but a web designer.

I still have a hard time explaining what I do. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a creative endeavor. I make web sites (gee, that wasn’t hard). When I’m done, there’s something there that wasn’t there before, or there’s something there that’s better than what was there before. Is it design? I don’t know. I suppose so, especially if you define “design” the way Dave Parker does above. But I still have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach knowing that the term is most often used to describe an approach to web site creation that, in my experience, has most often resulted in unusable sites that I’m then asked to tinker with to make them more able to meet the objectives laid out by my clients.

dave parker — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

Of course IA is design, in the same way that many things we do throughout the day are design.

Design is seeing a problem to be solved or a task to be accomplished and figuring out (or borrowing from established practice) the best way to solve that problem or accomplish that task.

When you cook dinner—whether you make the dishes up yourself or follow someone else’s directions—you are designing. When you decide whether you will mow your lawn in rows or in a circular pattern, you are designing. When you drive to work, choosing the best route based on traffic and other factors, you are designing. When you take a shower and decide to put the shampoo on your hair before scrubbing your face, you are designing. And when you organize a Web site’s information and provide for a computer user the optimum path to get to that information, you are definitely designing.

keith bishop — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

I think IA can either be “design” or “not design”.

As Edward de Bono once stated,

“You can analyse the past, but you have to design the future”

This relates to IA very clearly, on one hand we can come up with the deliverables for IA in a project by applying rules learn’t from past experiences (be it our own or other people’s). This approach would give us a technically correct solution based on tried and tested principles.

But, that solution will not likely be very ground breaking or serve to push the development of IA (as a whole) forward.

To do that we need to design, to use our intuition, to take risks, to discover new ways of doing things and perhaps be a bit crazy.

So my boring conclusion is that there will always be room for both the “non designer” IA person and the “designer” IA person, just as some projects need a “standard” level of usability where as other projects may need a more “innovative” approach.

The sad thing is, for me, is that the majority of people I have worked with in software development or web design, fail to recogonise the importance of IA or indeed how far it can (and must) develop.

Lee Fleming — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

What makes you think usability specialists (whomever those are) are “free to leave the room?” Usability should be entwined with design from beginning to end of a website or software build. Usability begins, I think, with a basic understanding of the purpose of the site or software along with a clear understanding of the intended customers and/or users. Without this, it isn’t design, it’s just “making things pretty.”

I’ve noticed a tendency for programmers to write code with programmers in mind and designers to design for other designers. What the concept of usability is supposed to do is keep all these worker bees focused on who should be in mind: the user.

Unless one works for a largish agency with “specialists” for each phase of a website or software build, designers, in addition to being information architects (whatever that means), must also be “usability specialists.” And I think most designers are, at least to a certain extent. Except for those who insist on using teeny tiny letters that nobody but children can hope to read.

One client struggled with what to call my position within their firm (consultant would not do). They settled on “Web Architect” as something that embraces information architecture, usability, design, and production. Whatever. As long as they pay my invoices.

Kris Rzepkowski — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

I deal with this awkward reality of IA not being design almost everyday. I’m a visual designer that willfully left behind traditional Graphic and Visual Design to work as an “Interaction Designer” at a company where the role is primarily IA, often Usability Specialist, sometimes User Interface Designer, and never Art Director.

So when I do my job that takes an ultra complex set of requirements and weaves it into some semblance of a product through blocky site maps, gritty screen schematics, and less than refined User Interface boards to hand to a developer, you better believe I’m designing!

And when your usability person is there the whole time you’re designing said complexity – providing hints and offering an alternative point of view…they’re designing too.

In the end I’d expect objectivity in the usability test methods and report. That report should be the roadmap for the next iteration. So Usability should have the guts to help solve the problems they so eloquently outline in the report – help design the solution.

I’ve noticed within an agency environment, there are constantly people jockeying for a new position where they can “gather requirements”, “define products”, “strategize”. Thus the desire to be Chief Client Consultant Officer Guru, or Senior Consulting Project Manager, or VP of Strategic Product Idea generation. All of these phony positions have the benefit of being “creative idea” positions, but none have the responsibility of “creative solutions”. That would require DESIGN.

George Olsen — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

Back when I was in journalism there was an apropos phrase for the stage when you had to shear away all that beautiful prose that wasn’t necessary to the story. It was called “killing your babies”—and it _is_ hard to do.

But it’s a skill the best writers, and designers, have to learn how to do. It’s the flip side of having the courage to make the creative leap.

The biggest difficulty I’ve had with younger designers (both print and web) is getting them to understand it that’s its not personal, since as John says, they’ve got their egos invested in it.

However the same might be said of usablity folks as well. Sometimes usability concerns need to be balanced against other concerns, for example as Dan Shaffer talks about in “Building Brand into Structure.” But too often, I hear usability results presented as an all-or-nothing proposition.

John S. Rhodes — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 22:24:29 GMT

“Usability is criticism. It looks at the designer’s creations and says “I have evaluated on X, Y and Z and found it wanting in A, B and C” Then usability specialists are free to leave the room. They’ve done their piece; they can now sit back and wait for the next creation. It’s valuable, it informs and improves our work, and it’s safe – emotionally—for the practitioner.”

—

I do not agree. Usability, when done right, is about working with designers. You don’t do usability and then throw it over the wall to designers. You don’t run studies and just pass the data along. Testing scenarios are built by having usability folks and designers sit down together to review the research objectives. Usability professionals are part of the development team; they should not stand alone.

By the way, the knife does cut the other way. I can’t tell you how many times I have provided hard usability data to designers (and project managers) only to have them reject it for design reasons. Maybe I am free to leave the room…and maybe I am booted out of the room because the designers don’t want to hear what users want. That’s not very “safe” for me. I have an interest in getting what the users need into a design, but it sometimes doesn’t happen. It “hurts” so I guess that does mean I am emotionally invested.

I would like to be more involved in design but the issue is that if I get involved in design then my wants and my desires will play second fiddle to the needs of users. Detaching from a design can be hard, but it is needed so that some level of objectivity can be maintained. Then again, maybe I am wrong. Maybe I don’t have the emotional strength to do both design and usability. That’s an interesting thought I suppose. I wonder what other usability people say about this.

Adam Greenfield — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:50:14 GMT

(eesh…you’ve just summarized my book. Do I still have to write it?)

Yes, IA IS DESIGN.
And guess what? Increasingly, design is IA. Last year, this was the “5,000 foot view,” but it gets closer to earth every day.

What do I mean? I mean that the methodologies we kludged together to account for a situation of explicit informational flow – a user interacting with the Web – also happens to be very useful for situations of implicit informational flow. Such as the interaction of a user with, say, a citrus juicer.

You think I’m kidding? I drew up a persona, developed a (admittedly barebones) scenario bringing that persona into contact with a citrus juicer, elaborated a use case specifying each point of informational flow between object and user…the results were illuminating.

If designers don’t learn to think this way, I’m betting they’ll be swept aside by those who do.