Evolution of my relationship with design
Four years ago, I started my career in design as a Web Designer. Around that time, web was everything design to me. CSS was design. font-family was design. I believed making web pages look good was the job of a web designer. If what I made didn’t look good, why would they hire a web designer?
I spent hours lurking online, searching for a perfect combination of hex codes. A perfect combination of sans-serifs. Serifs were never an option. For no specific reasons, I considered them ugly back then.
I spent countless hours inspecting the elements on other web pages. Firebug was a thing then. When I first discovered it, I felt like I had unleashed the magic fountain of creativity. Everything that I needed to know to make a web page “look” good. Layout? We can float it. Colour? We can copy the hex codes. Typography? font-family for the win.
Observing and copying from others helped me to somewhat understand and feel those invisible and unintuitive details that made design “look” good. Yet, I couldn’t pinpoint what those nuances were.
Back then, I didn’t believe in having reasons. If designers needed a reason for design, what were engineers for?! Designers were artists. Artists needed no reasons.
I took offence when people didn’t like my design. I hoped they would develop some “taste”. How can they not like it? It’s a piece of art. I would hear “but Kamal, I can’t read that text, it’s so light and small.” And I would reply — “Really? I can read them fine. We need smaller text to have more whitespace.”
When I think about it now, those people were my stakeholders. Aligning them should’ve been part of my design process. We needed usability and function but I was favouring minimalism.
I moved to a product company later, and graduated from being an artist to being a “growth hacker”. Optimising funnels here, reducing drop-offs there. I would spend hours mulling over how I can make more people click on the buttons and links. Should I change the colour? Animate it? How about a different copy? To me, this was User Engagement. I didn’t know who our users were and what they were trying to do. Clicking was money. That’s all it mattered.
My thinking took a fundamental shift at one of the design critiques. My manager asked me: “But… what is the problem we are trying to solve here?” I looked at him in disbelief. Were designers supposed to solve a problem? Weren’t we the artists? Who needed no reasons.
I came across this quote: [Design] is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. — Steve Jobs. OH! So this is what he meant. If Jobs had said something it had to be truer than true. I had misunderstood design all along. Design was less about appearance, fashion, or superficial beauty and more about being functional in nature. To this day, I regret not knowing this much earlier in my career.
After coming to terms that good design can actually look ugly, I started noticing things in a different way. I read about Craigslist. I checked out Google. Reddit. eBay. Amazon. They looked pretty bad but they all worked. They were all well designed.
In order to have well designed products, I learned that I needed to understand problems at a deeper level. After all, design was solving problems first and following Dieter Rams’ nine other principles later. I started spending inordinate amount of time diving deep into the problems and started talking to users to know more about what they were trying to do. Nothing beats listening to actual humans describe their experience of using something that you have designed. Sometimes it’s exciting but almost always it is scary. I wished I knew the importance of involving users more and earlier in the process.
Great! I had talked to real users and got to know of their problems. I tested different approaches and started solving them. I felt more confident than ever. I had developed empathy.
Things should have worked flawlessly except they didn’t. What was I missing? I introspected and figured I needed to work on creating the impact. Coming up with great solutions was just one aspect of design; working with people who were turning ideas and prototypes into reality is another important aspect. Those carefully crafted interactions and the documents containing all those “delightful” copies don’t affect lives until they have been prioritised, engineered, implemented and shipped.
As designers, we have strong reasons and beliefs for what we propose to be built. It is easier to get it built when everyone understands (and agrees) to the reasons and shares the same beliefs. Being able to communicate our reasons and beliefs will help. Everyone loves a good story. Every time I succeeded in telling a coherent one, I experienced relative success.
Good design is storytelling, I realised.
The more I look into this evolution of understanding design over the years, the more curious I have become. Every year feels like learning something new, something entirely different from the previous year. I am only able to see and appreciate the nuances of design when learning them was essential for getting things done at that point in time.
Design is about learning and evolving. Learning how users behave and why; evolving the solutions to address user needs. Learning how I can align my stakeholders through better communication; and evolving the narrative to create a coherent story that everyone comes to believe in. I was hoping to be a “pro” at what I do after four years in design but it seems like I haven’t even scratched the surface of design. Now I have more questions than answers. Maybe design is art? ☉
Come figure out design with us at Carousell. We are hiring.
Evolution of my relationship with design
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