You might be a recently-graduated designer. Or maybe you’re new-to-the-design-space. Perhaps you’re just starting your journey in a startup. I want to save you from falling in some potholes. So, I’ve collected some of my learnings to date. I call it…

Things I didn’t know about design

1. Design doesn’t come from a single designer, or even many designers.
All great design is really a combo of working with great other people, especially your fellow engineers. There’s really no single great designer. I’ve had more than my fair share of hubris. And seen the results of thinking that one person has all the answers.

I’ve learnt that showing your designs early to one or two trusted people in your team is a great way to debug a design early on, when it hasn’t cost you much time. When you’re stuck, or when you think it’s done and great. When it’s just a little seed of an idea or when it’s barely an idea at all. So many times I’ve been told a better way of doing something by a developer, or person in marketing, or QA, or a user/customer.

For example; Jony Ive was long touted as Apple’s über-designer, which he was, but he’s one of a team of 10–20 world-class designers in the Apple ID (industrial design) group. This team works through every product together from sketch to finish, including spending months in China with manufacturing teams to produce the desired shipping product at the desired quality. This team’s ouptut includes designing bosses (the pieces that hold a part in place during manufacturing), to specifying the grade of lubricating oil in a machine.

2. Product design means getting something great into the hands of a customer.
It doesn’t mean drawing some cool pictures of UI, and then not having it ship because engineering couldn’t build it, or it got built badly. Or it was built exactly to spec and turned out to be a bad design because, hey, design is an art, not a science. Maybe you design and build (in parallel) something great, but it’s priced out of reach of the customer (economics), or you can’t tell the story in a way that a lot of people see their need for it (marketing), or it’s unavailable to the customers who really need it (distribution) or the company runs out of money because the product isn’t priced profitably (economics again).

Example: I spent months at a US design agency working on a smart-home device. Despite creating what we believed were beautiful designs, the final implementation fell short of our expectations. Eventually, the agency sent me to visit the third-party developers. During my week-long visit, I realized our app was barely considered—it simply wasn't a priority for this development team juggling multiple clients.

3. There is a vast difference between designing something, and delivering something.
If you work at an Agency, your customer is your client, and so your deliverable is a picture of a design, or, at best, something the client likes. If you are part of company actually building stuff, then you get to talk to the actual end users, and THEY decide whether they want it or not, by handing over money.

There’s a massive amount of a designers’ work that is just the iterative feel-and-adjust and push-until-it’s-fixed and the listen-and-change-your-mind. The first images in Figma/Sketch are really just the start of the process.

A great read that includes the topic of iterative design is Ken Kocienda’s book ‘Creative Selection’.

4. Almost all design ideas are not new.
Almost all design ideas aren’t new. Design ideas come around again and again. And, eventually, hopefully, engineering, social change, or some other factor means that they can become products. Figma didn’t invent symbolic design components, Ivan Sutherland’s Sketch application demoed them in 1963. Microsoft and Apple didn’t invent the GUI, Doug Englebart and team’s Mother of All Demos (1968) showed the way. Alan Kay’s work on the Dynabook gave us the form factor for the laptop. Bill Buxton and team’s multitouch tablet (1982) was one of many multitouch computing devices, decades before iPhone.

Seriously. Go and watch The Mother of All Demos to see a person demoing to a crowd, for the first time, a GUI, a computer mouse, an interactive personal computing experience, productivity apps, video calling, amongst other things. Even the idea of a tech demo was new.

5. You don’t need to prototype the whole thing.
It’s common in Industrial design to make a ‘looks as’ and ‘works as’ model. The former is a beautiful, but unworking model of the product that you show and hand around. The latter is a big ugly, wire-filled, rough-but-actually working version. People can imagine these two ideas melded into a single product. But trying to prototype something that looks beautiful, or in its whole, is impossible. This goes for any part of a software experience. You can prototype just the new, novel part, as a little sandboxed experience. Don’t worry, people can meld a few vignettes into a single movie in their mind.

Some work I’m very proud of was done for a paper document scanning app called Scannable. The model of detecting in a scene, and lifting a page into view is now a very standard experience. And that is something I’d prototyped in isolation to see if it felt right using tools including Facebook’s Origami.

6. Most design should be invisible. A little design should be wow.
It’s easy to think that design needs to be ‘delightful’ or ‘attention getting’. Largely, great design is completely invisible to users. Or, so expected that it’s almost boring or mundane. This is the way it should be. You can do amazing design, amazing engineering, and no one will notice, because you simply removed all the friction in a particular experience. The greatest innovation is removing problems, removing friction. This is the result of great design, and great engineering, and isn’t seen by the customer because it’s not there to be seen. You can’t see a problem if it’s not there.

The other side of this coin is, that sometimes attention-getting is actually a core design element. Colour, or form, or behaviour could have a job to do—and that job is to impress on the customer that you have technical expertise, or that this particular ‘thing’ is worthy of their attention. A brightly coloured handle to show where to grab. A micro-printed currency note to demonstrate implied value.

I worked with a colleague who did a little work (in the early days Apple still outsourced some design) for Apple, reporting to Steve Jobs. He told the story of being requested to draw some icons for Apple’s Core technologies. The agency worked fastidiously, creating beautiful, minimalist icons. But —when they saw their work presented in a Steve Jobs keynote — saw that the icons had been covered in a shiny ‘aqua’ spheres. This perplexed my friend. And knowing Job’s belief in minimalism, they ask “Why did you put the aqua bubbles overtop our icons?” Steve’s perhaps predictably stoic reply was “Because only we could”. My colleague understood that Steve meant that there was a value in the quality of production. That, because only Apple understood how to technically design in this way, they valued the value of this unusually additive design element.

7. A lot of your job is Quality Assurance.
You can’t spec everything. No-one has time to write, or read all that documentation. At best, you’re sitting right next to the engineers whom you are building alongside. In any case, you should be using the product, and finding all those little nicks, and sharp edges that either were missed by the dev team when building, or by you when designing. You’ll never get them all. But in a perfect world you get to a point where only you seem bothered by the tiny problems that remain.

8. A lot of your job is also other things.
You’ll be salesperson, convincing a boss, or a team that a particular thing is both doable, and worth doing. You’ll be providing assets to marketing. You’ll be researching and understanding the technologies that your product is built on, so you’ll be professional researcher and student.

9. A great design process doesn’t necessarily make for great design.
Great products, I think, are never built in a linear fashion. It’s not a factory, not an assembly line. Not perfect design process will always spit out a perfect product. Many products shouldn’t exist. Many great products have a part, or feature, that takes great effort to design and build, only to be removed before getting into the customer’s hands, and being all the better for it. There will be arguments. Tempers may flare. There will be sadness as something you work on doesn’t ship. To be clear, work shouldn’t be demeaning, immoral, combative or abusive. But—it is unlikely that great design can happen without the occasional bumps against the real world, or the real-world experience of someone else’s opinion.

10. Your gut is a real thing. Trusting your gut is a practice.
Sometimes you don’t have to know the reason. The product you’ve all worked hard on for months should be good, but something in you tells you that it’s not fun to use. Or it just kinda…sucks. When you can’t put words to it, when you can’t articulate that to a room full of people, or your boss, then it’s easy to second guess. It’s pretty woo-woo, so it’s not great course material. But that intuition is a skill you can practice, hone, and increasingly trust. Invest in it, try to work out why you feel that way. Is it all too slow? Is it just actually all too cumbersome for what the product actually delivers. Is it kinda cool on paper, but in reality it’s a bit…naff? Would you share your product with your friends?

You’ve either had this experience, or been at the end of it. A friend telling you about this great site to get cheaper plane tickets. Or this new fruit store that has an amazing selection of fruit. A cool new car they just bought that is just wonderful to drive, or a nail polish with an amazing colour. When you’ve designed something great, you’ll want to tell the people you care for, all about it.

11. Point to something rather than trying to make a point.
Much of your job is to communicate. To your team, to your boss, to your customers. Their interpretation of what you present is the truth, not what you think you presented. Have something to show. This can be a rough sketch on a whiteboard. The most basic click-through prototype. What helps is using progressively blunter tools for younger ideas. Is it just a vague idea for a layout? Use a really thick sharpie. Got some designs, but don’t want to give the impression they’re done? Convert them to black and white. Collect screenshots or images of similar products, or products in a different space that have the qualities you want.

I hope that helps.

Keith.

Resources

Tony Fadell’s book titled Build is a lively, engaging story that is somewhat biographical, but largely a set of shared lessons centred around the making of the iPod and Nest thermostat.

Ken Kocienda’s Creative Selection tells the story of Safari, and the iPhone keyboard from a very in-the-trenches perspective.