Great product design and the delivery of great user experiences are (or should be) an important part of any product company’s strategy. However, the decision of how important design is to a particular company, and how much to invest in design, is not really up to the designers.

I encounter many junior and senior designers that want a decision in product strategy.  They want authority over where a product is going rather than simply being told “we have decided to add feature X so start designing!” But no one is going to give designers authority over those decisions, nor should they. Strategy is set by the corporate strategists — marketing, business development, product, and executive leaders.  If designers want to affect those decisions they must learn to look at the world from strategy executives’ perspectives just as they look at the world from their users’ perspectives when designing products for them. They must find the intersections between design goals and business goals and use these intersections to influence product direction.

Great designers rely on unrelenting evangelizing, politics, friends in key roles, and educating others about the importance of design. Even though they don’t make the decisions, they influence the decisions, and their effectiveness will be measured by their success as influencers. The acceptance of this will lead to better products because designers will put more effort into learning how to influence good design choices.  To us, design is obviously important.  Perfect is standard.  But this is not how others necessarily think.

To be a truly successful designer, you must learn how to influence product direction and strategy.

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It is usually at this point that I come to some realization. Tonight that moment was defined by frustration regarding misconceptions of software design.

I evangelize design daily. I argue for the importance of good design, justifying the investment in time and resources to design and build smarter. But recently I was told a story about the iPhone that illustrates one of the sources of the cautiously skeptical expressions of many business executives that I meet with.

Hardware mistakes are expensive; software mistakes are (relatively) cheap!

According to one person, much more design and testing work went in to the hardware of the iPhone than the software, and the reason given was because it is much more expensive and unacceptable to ship defective hardware than it is to ship flaky, buggy software. (I cannot verify the accuracy of this claim and truly wish I had real data to support or deny this.)

At Dux2007 in Chicago, I attended a workshop where I asked the group why we don’t design software like we do hardware? Why don’t we spend more time in prototypes, mockups, etc. One of the attendees, a software designer… said “because it’s cheap to fix software problems – all you have to do is make a download available that resolves the bugs.”

That’s what so many executives are really thinking, aren’t they? Build it, test it, get it
out the door, and then ship fixes as necessary. Time to market, fix later.

And herein lies the mistake: fixing bugs is not equivalent to fixing design.

True, bugs in software can be fixed easier and cheaper than bugs in hardware. But we’re not talking about bugs–we’re talking about DESIGN. You can’t fix a design with a download! Design is the essence of the product, how the product interacts with users, the personality of the product, the metaphors, etc.

Attempting to fix design in an update results in confusion, retraining, potential loss of trust, etc. The changes are too significant. Therefore redesign is often delayed until the next major release of the product, resulting in additional costs, potential loss of customer loyalty and the opportunity to “lock them in”, etc.

So, yes, software bugs can be remedied easier than bugs in hardware. But design problems in software are no easier or cheaper to resolve than hardware design flaws, and therefore we (software designers, creators, builders) must adopt better processes, principles, and expertise towards designing better software products from the start.

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Maybe I’m the only one who has this problem? It figures. It’s obvious that the design team for my product line struggles with showing value to our company. But can you really blame the company? After all, product designers are sissy artists only concerned with colors and whether or not the horizontal navigation properly aligns with the banner bar. That was sarcasm…so please stop crafting the hate mail message that just popped into your brain. As a product manager, I have the upmost respect for product design. They have treated my customers with some very sexy (technical term for us ignorant folks when describing good design), well-designed software that continues to receive “oh’s” and “ah’s” from the market.

But those “oh’s” and “ah’s” fade fast. They just don’t seem to stick in the mind of sales, marketing, and software engineering. This lack of “stickiness” is primarily because customers keep banging the drum for more tangible features – features they think they *want* but not necessarily features they *need* (but that’s a whole new topic for another post). Not a week goes by where a sales person walks in my office and politely demands some new widget report. If I can’t deliver the report, XYZ Co. won’t buy our product, therefore the company won’t meet its revenue target for the quarter, therefore we all lose our jobs, and therefore we’re all homeless. No one ever comes into my office making the homeless argument because XYZ Co. wants better workflow in the product or is halting the deal because of the lack of aesthetic appeal in the UI. Sure there are complaints about these items but it’s never the priority. The priority is what the customer thinks they want before purchasing the product. That’s their buying criteria and subconsciously all of the sissy design stuff can come later.

To make matters worse for our product design team and their fragile egos, our products are legacy and very successful. This success was built with little to no expertise in product design and this success continues today, although we have injected some product design expertise into product development. Therefore, it’s difficult to separate what’s really driving the success. Is it the new, streamlined, and sexy interface that product design contributed to the product? Or is it the new widget data collection module we implemented too? Maybe it’s both? Unfortunately, the both argument dies quickly with the reminder of the company’s success before implementing design expertise and garnering the “oh’s” and “ah’s” from customers.

All of this rambling really boils down to a simple question: What is design’s impact on the bottom line? And a few follow-up questions: How do you prove it? We all know it is part of the bottom line somewhere but can you tie product revenue to it? Without question the customer’s experience with your product improves with the addition of capable product designers who focus on the aesthetic appeal and usability of your product. But that experience is hard to put dollar signs against. When the company thinks back about how we closed the XYZ Co. account, it’s because software engineering cranked out the widget report in the nick of time without product design slowing them down. And thank goodness…otherwise we’d all be homeless. Praise software engineering and sales! By the way, why do we need product design again?

Again, maybe I’m the only sucker out there looking for answers. It could be an issue of my product’s market. Maybe product design becomes an obvious competitive differentiator as the competition begins to catch up. Hopefully I’m not alone; otherwise you just wasted a lot of valuable time reading this post – sucker! Again…that was sarcasm. However, I do see a lot of successful, legacy products on the market that are just plagued with poor design – they just ain’t sexy. Are these companies going to do anything about it?

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