I love cigars. I smoke about 1 per month as a treat. That may seem like nothing, but I really enjoy it. About 2/3 of the way through a good Rocky Patel, there is a moment of clarity. Greens become greener, blacks become richer and edges become sharper. A little Laphroaig doesn’t hurt either.
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.
I’m happy to announce that I have been promoted to Vice President, Product Design at NetQoS.
See:
http://www.netqos.com/company/management.html#Russell_Wilson
http://www.netqos.com/newsroom/press_releases/2007/11-27-07.html
The formation of this role elevates the importance of design within our company and further communicates to the industry the growing need for design leadership in software development. It is my belief that senior and executive level design positions will be standard roles in software organizations within the next 5-10 years.
I am honored to announce that Dexo Design made it on the list of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs/!
Dexo was selected among other world class design blogs such as Functioning Form, Adaptive Path, Boxes and Arrows, A List Apart, UX Matters, Zeldman, Meyer Web, Keith Instone, Design By Fire, Louis Rosenfeld, Usernomics, Experientia, Information Aesthetics (one of my favorites!), Alertbox, and many more…
Design is a broad term.
Some claim that everyone designs, and depending on exactly how you define design, that may be true. Not surprisingly though, many professional designers react uncomfortably to this. It helps me to distinguish between being creative and designing. Creativity is a free-form process that anyone can participate in. We are all creative in some way or another. But professional design is a discipline where experience, talent, techniques, tools, and skills are applied to synthesize and articulate fuzzy creative ideas into something usable.
There are many facets to that “something usable” though: the interior, the exterior, how it looks, how it performs its function, and so on. With regard to software there is database design, object-oriented design, web service design, interface design, navigation design, and visual design, just to name a few.
Why differentiate? Why distinguish between database design and visual design? It’s all design right? Because the talents, techniques, and tools required vary drastically among them. And we have people who refer to themselves as “designers” mixing with software engineers or programmers resulting in confusion about who is responsible for and designing what.
To help this issue, we can group the various design disciplines without over generalizing too much. “Front-end” and “back-end” are common terms used to separate the interface from underlying code – the code that makes everything work. It’s not bad I suppose and it has the advantage of already being used and understood (to some degree). But more appropriate terms would be “interactive design” and “functional design”.
Interactive design encompasses visual design, interaction design, user research, information architecture, information design (not database – the user representation and visualization), and usability. Interactive design is about the user experience, what the user sees and interacts with: form and behavior. Alternatively, functional design is about the underlying architecture and foundation to support and deliver the user experience.
Historically, we’ve done a good job on functional design. That’s what software development has been all about. I can’t count the times in the past I’ve heard “just slap a GUI on it and we’re ready to ship!” (You would never hear that in automotive design, would you?). As users’ expectations have increased thanks to experience with well designed software (they didn’t know what they were missing) and the natural evolution and maturing of software development, interactive designers are slowly being recognized as critical to world-class software development.
So, by software design we mean interactive design and functional design; equally important, but drastically different.
There are two career paths for software designers: the path to creative leadership and the path to executive leadership.
Which path is right for you? Let me outline some of the pros and cons of each:
| Creative Leader | Executive Leader |
| Pros: Flexible & unencumbered Follow your passion |
Pros: Member of executive team Political influence |
| Cons: Less political power |
Cons: Not an individual contributor Management The business side |
As a “creative leader” you will drive design from the top and be expected to contribute directly yourself. You will have flexibility and you will be unencumbered by the management duties typical of high-ranking executives, freeing you to “create.” You will be expected to produce, to evangelize, and possibly to write or speak at conferences. However, while being seen as the “brains” behind design, you may also be somewhat dismissed by corporate executives as having very little “business” knowledge, and therefore very little input into corporate strategy and sometimes even product strategy.
As an “executive leader” you are expected to understand the business-side; market drivers, profit/loss, etc. and most importantly be skilled and effective in management — a task many up and comers are often shocked to find so difficult and taxing. The more people you manage, the less you contribute yourself. The executive leader enjoys a more standard position in the corporate power hierarchy and therefore will wield more strategic power and influence.
Creative and executive leaders hold varying titles depending on the company. Some examples include:
| Creative Leader Creative Director Chief of Design Chief Designer Principal Designer |
Executive Leader VP Product Design Director Product Design Design Director VP User Experience Chief Design Officer |
The choice of which path to follow can be difficult if you want to remain an individual contributor and focus on design, but also want to have strong political influence in product strategy and mix with the rest of the company’s executive team. There may be hybrid roles that combine these two to some degree, but I question their ultimate effectiveness.
So, ultimately the question you have to ask yourself is whether you want to create and lead through design, or build and design through leadership? Or, more simply, do you want to push yourself as a creative or push yourself as a business-leader?
New word: Criticallous
From critical (inclined to criticize severely and unfavorably) and callous (feeling or showing no sympathy for others).
Function: adj
1. Used to describe someone who is both harshly critical and seemingly lacking in empathy. For example: “Joe is so criticallous in every design meeting we have; it makes it hard to brainstorm.”
It seems that a part of human nature is to accept things as they are and adapt accordingly. This can be both a strength and a weakness. With regard to tools and products, we use what we have, most often accepting the shortcomings, until someone comes along and invents something better or makes an improvement. And then we examine the new product or improvement in awe, wondering why we didn’t think of it, surprised at how obvious it is in hindsight.
It is not easy to remove oneself from the everyday flow of life, from the behavioral patterns we form and adaptations we make, to acknowledge the problems and ask “how can this be better?” And yet, this is the space where designers should spend a great deal of time.
To that lofty end, I’m going to step down from my dramatic soliloquy and ask “Why in the name of all that is holy does it have to take so long to start Windows?”
I, like many others I’m sure, use my computer for hours and hours every day. And one of my chief frustrations is waiting for my laptop to start up, and for that matter shutdown. Because I use a laptop, I start up and shutdown often. This isn’t as much of a problem for desktop users who leave their computer running, but when the power goes out or you have to install new software, prepare to wait.
And why should this be acceptable? Would it be acceptable if it took a web site 5min to load? Would it be acceptable if it took your camera 5min to start? What about your TV? Your washing machine? Your car? We have adapted and come to accept it as “the way it is”, but I argue that it is the biggest usability bug in Windows! To be fair, this problem isn’t limited to Windows. I don’t use a Mac, so I can’t compare, but I’m sure it doesn’t turn on instantly.
If it were up to me, I would have a team working around the clock on a solution for instant-on/off computers. I’m sure it’s not an easy problem to solve, but a fix for this unacceptable bug would have a tremendous impact on productivity and the entire user experience surrounding computers.
Two noteworthy articles, and harbingers for the rise of the design executive were published this August:
Wanted: VPs of Design (Businessweek, Aug-07)
Enter the chief design officer!: hail to the chief! (ACM Interactions, Aug-07)
Motivated by these articles, I did a quick Google search on “vice president of user experience” and found this role at several well known companies including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft, and Oracle, as well as countless lesser-known and smaller companies. I didn’t bother searching other possible titles.
It’s apparent that companies are beginning to recognize the value and need for design leadership as an integral part of the executive team. More so than ever before users demand more from products, and if a company is looking to achieve competitive advantage, innovate, and be an industry leader, it must elevate design as part of its strategy.
Ben Erwin, one of the product managers I work with (and a good friend) at NetQoS writes:
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?