Let’s talk about what design can and can’t do.
Like many of my peers, I had a lot of feelings after I read Robert Fabricant’s article in FastCompany, The Big Design Freakout. There have been many valid criticisms of this article, but my biggest issue with it was that he seemed to be generalizing from his experiences with a small and specific subset of design leaders. The subtitle of his article is “A generation of design leaders grapple with their future,” but I think a more accurate one might have been “Some design leaders over-promised in the past, and now the industry grapples with reality.”
Fabricant was a design executive at Frog Design for many years, and agencies like Frog and IDEO successfully incubated, grew, and showcased product design in ways that brought it to the corporate consciousness. I saw many design leaders from agencies like these speak at conferences and author articles in the formative years of digital product design, and I thought of them as advocates of what I call “capital D Design.” They were enthusiastic, principled, and full of (sometimes bombastic) zeal about the power of Design, about how–if it were only given the chance!–it could revolutionize products and life, solve any problem, and Save the World! (I bet you can picture the “Designer” archetype I am talking about. [1])
Of course design does have real value and solves many problems, and during the decades that followed, the practice of digital product design and design thinking proliferated throughout industry in what Peter Merholz and Andy Polaine called the Cambrian Explosion of Design. But when Fabricant asks if now, in 2024, we’re in a reckoning after having failed to prove our ROI, I wonder if what’s really being talked about is the fact that design (even “Design”) could never live up to the promise of fixing everything and saving the world.
We do not live in a society that automatically rewards excellence, we live inside of a capitalist system that has been deregulating for years. And as Scott Berkun explains clearly, bad design makes money. Companies succeed or fail not on how beautiful their product is, or how user-friendly, or how “good” it is by any metric other than if it makes profit. Profit can be generated in many different ways (like creating a monopoly, using cheaper materials, even conducting layoffs), and design and quality can be expensive. As Andy Polaine talks about in his excellent response to Fabricant’s article, many of us choose mediocre products or services in our lives for valid reasons like affordability.
Designers who claimed that design can fix anything did all of us a disservice. Because design does have real value and can greatly contribute both to business financial success and human flourishing. Design research can identify what is needed to create real value for humans, and what might not be a sound investment to build. Design can craft a product or service that is easy to use or that solves an important problem. And design can create pleasure and inspire loyalty between people and a thing. Design provides the most value around deciding WHAT to make and HOW to make it work. But design on its own cannot actually make it work or ensure profitability.
Long ago I developed the following rubric for understanding how product functioning translates to star reviews. This was based on an analysis I conducted of hundreds of app store and Amazon reviews for a product I was working on at the time. I wanted to communicate to my internal partners that we couldn’t just fix a broken product with a new UI, that when the basic functioning of the product is sometimes broken, it really doesn’t matter what the interface looks like or what bonus features it has. People care about “can this product accomplish my objective” and only when that answer is consistently YES do people benefit from how well it accomplishes it. Design can’t fix a faulty piece of hardware or a broken api, and until those are functional no one will care about your microinteractions. (Of course lipsticked pigs come to mind, but in many cases it goes beyond lipstick, with businesses wanting to add whole new selling points–a top hat! Roller skates!–to what is still a pig.)
Product Report Card
A+ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ | This is something I can fall in love with, it does something surprisingly well. (5 stars plus glowing reviews and product write-ups) |
A ★★★★★ | This is smooth and reliable, a product I would call premium or high quality. (5 stars) |
B ★★★★✩ | This is reliable and functional. (4 stars) |
B- ★★★✬✩ | This is functional, but parts feel unpolished. (3.5 stars) |
C ★★★✩✩ | This works ok, but some touchpoints feel cheap or annoying. (3 stars) |
D ★★✩✩✩ | This is frustrating (possibly ugly), and occasionally doesn’t work. (2 stars) |
F ★✩✩✩✩ | This is highly frustrating and broken most of the time. (1 star) |
The tools and discipline of design can be so good at getting to what that core is, understanding what must work all the time, and how it should work. It can also determine what is the special thing and how it could work surprisingly well to generate fandom and loyalty among customers. (Note, you do not need to spread “delight” across the entire surface area of the product. A moment or two of “Wow, that worked surprisingly well!” is substantially more powerful.)
Designers who claimed that design can fix anything did all of us a disservice.
And this is where we should focus. We as design teams need to advocate for working on the right kind of problems, understanding clearly where our value lies. The power of design does not, and never will, outweigh the power of technology or finance. I have fallen in love with so many products that were beautifully designed, and that did their job well, but that disappeared because the company never managed to be profitable [2]. They (dare I say it?) probably spent too much on design, without understanding how all of the financial pieces of the puzzle needed to fit together sustainably. And as Julie Zhou points out, “If your company isn’t profitable after some period of time, everyone loses their jobs.” Design did not save these products or companies, let alone the world.
Design and Product orgs together are the “what” and the “why” of a product or service. Technology is the “how,” finance is the “how much,” and marketing is the “where.” None of us is a superhero, but we all have a role to play. As is often the case, collaboration, compromise, truth, transparency, and hard decisions will help us collectively take each next step in the right direction.
[1] Fabricant also said this: “Even as design thinking packaged itself successfully as a mainstream business process to senior management, we neglected to mention that designers, by nature, are pretty lousy managers, and there was little opportunity or support to develop those skills in boutique practice.” (Emphasis mine.) I think he meant these Capital-D “Designers” were lousy managers. I have known many designers who use the tools of design: objective observation, goal articulation, creative thinking, iteration, empathy, and clear communication to become excellent managers.
[2] Rdio, Pebble Round, Jambox to name a few.
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