Why should designers make more? (a miniseries)
Why are designers valuable? Because they are a strategic competitive advantage and necessary for building world class industry leading products.
I bought an Edirol R-09 recorder some time ago to record user interviews/observations. It received great ratings based on the quality of its recordings, and honestly the recordings are very good. In fact, I believe the Edirol R-09 helped to establish the market for high quality portable field recording devices.
But despite doing what it is supposed to do very well, I hated it. Why? The user interface is horrible. The body is plastic and feels flimsy. The hinged door for loading memory and batteries is worse than many plastic toys I buy my children. It was immediately clear to me that the user interface was an afterthought — more than likely a product created by a team that places little value in how the product looks or how customers interact with it as long as “the really hard part” is done well.
So what did I do? I found other products like the Olympus LS-10 and the Korg MR-1. Both are much better products. Why? Because of their user interface. I’m not an audio expert. I really have no idea which of the three ultimately provides the highest quality audio recording (although I suspect it’s the Korg). But the LS-10 and the MR-1 are fun to use and the quality of their construction is in a completely different class. They are also more expensive, but I was willing to pay more for a product that looked better, felt better, and was more fun to use. And in fact, the LS-10 is the one I carry in my briefcase.
My point? The user interface of products is just as important as what the products do! Sounds obvious right? And yet I meet so many executives who still see design as nothing more than “making it look pretty”. As a Vice President I am in many discussions, internally and externally, regarding employee compensation, and when it comes to salaries for designers, the scale is often significantly lower than developers.
This blows my mind. When will people get it? Am I just running into those that haven’t caught up yet? Unfortunately, I think not.
Users/customers evaluate products based on what they can see, feel, and interact with. If you don’t consider the user interface one of the most important parts of your product, you will never be an industry leader. And if you manage to take the lead by trail-blazing something new, you won’t remain there long as competition grows. If there was no alternative to the Edirol, I would have resigned myself to its shortcomings. Thank goodness that wasn’t the case. [Sidenote: I eventually gave the Edirol to one of my employees to use and she looked at it as if it was a cheap product. When I told her how much it cost, she couldn’t believe it. I reassured her several times that the quality of its recordings was very good.]
A juicer that makes great juice, but is made out of plastic with flimsy construction and horrible aesthetics will never stand the test of time. Likewise, a gorgeous juicing machine, solidly constructed with well thought out controls and dimensions that makes horrible juice will fail miserably. It is the combination of the two that achieves the products we love.
So invest at least as much in user interface design (aka industrial design, interaction design, user experience design, etc.) as you do in engineering if you want to increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, establish competitive advantage, and build loyalty!
Now back to reading email on my iPhone…
When I first saw the title of this thread, I processed the word “make” as to create.
as in “Why should designers create more”.
Before I clicked in to read the thread, I was already answering the question.
“How can’t we create more? It’s what we do. It’s what we love. It’s in our blood.”
Of course, you’re talking about making more money, but before I clicked in, I couldn’t help but look at the question worded this way, and swapping the location of the two words; ‘designer’, ‘make’:
“Why should makers design more?”
(Stick with me here, I’m not really going off on some weird and unrelated tangent, promise.)
I think the newly worded questions sheds some insight on the problem from a perspective of the average corporate executive.
In their eyes, are their designers ‘designing’? Or are we simply ‘making’ things?
Perhaps they don’t even distinguish a difference between the two.
“make the button do this.”
“make this page load after that happens”
“make them have to fill this out first”
“make that green…”
They may miss out on understanding the fundamental difference between ‘designing’, and ‘making’.
It’s a lack of understanding, a lack of knowledge — an innocent ignorance of what’s required to complete the process.
From a traditional corporate executive perspective, they know that their engineers/developers need to have their heads deep in code-land. They have to understand and be able to work with all that ‘mumbo-jumbo’, and the really good ones that do it well can sit down at a terminal and whip up some voodoo magic of functionality with a maestro’s flair at the keyboard. It’s very easy to demonstrate the proficiency and deep knowledge they have with their skill set. The people in the boardroom have long understood that ‘code is hard’, and their rockstar developers can easily demonstrate that when it comes to the bottom line, they can produce functional deliverables at factory speed.
The designers, on the other hand, live in a more ethereal world of processes. It can sometimes have the potential to be somewhat thankless, as the better the designer is — the less it is they appear to have done.
What I mean by that is that when a designer takes a relatively complicated set of functional requirements, boils it all down and produces the most perfect, simple and understandable interaction that ‘totally nails it’, the final product is so simple and obvious that it’s often looked upon as “common sense”.
“That was easy”. The CEO thinks. “What other option was there?”
So in order to “spread the wealth”, something has to shift in the fundamental understanding of design at the top levels. There has to be a very solid understanding in terms of the bottom line. From a compensation basis, the only way designers are going to be valued, is when their value can be quantified in dollars. It needs to be detailed in the cost of operations.
Therefore, it needs to be clear that was is “made” is what was “designed”. The two terms are NOT interchangable. (It’s a bit of a catch22 in some ways, as in corporations where the designers are not valued, the designers rarely have the ability to begin the design process at the appropriate stage, and are often called in well after the engineers have already begun the ’skeleton code’, which can greatly hamper the designers ability to design the right thing)
The engineers can produce functional deliverables at top notch speed, they can make anything you ask for, but how many times at the 90% completion stage has some sort of deep problem in functionality reared it’s head?
It’s the old 90/90 rule:
“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”
The designer’s value is directly related to how much that 80% just cost the company.
Value them early, give them the ablility to first design what you are going to make, and eventually — the numbers will speak for themselves.
Hopefully, over the next few years, there will be access to some solid numbers to back this up, but I don’t know of any such stats at this juncture.
fingers crossed.
Shaun