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This article will help you determine if investing time in building variables within your design system is worthwhile. Project scope significantly influences this decision, so consider the following sections to gauge whether adding variables to your design system will benefit the project.

If your team struggles with design system inconsistencies, either in design or development, leveraging variables can greatly improve workflows across all project roles. Variables now act as a key method for defining styles, strings, numbers, and toggling between dark and light modes within design systems. This evolution offers teams the potential for shared and maintainable value definitions.

Variables in Color Styles

Variables offer more versatility and systemization than static styles. While styles were previously limited to static colors or text sizes, they can now include multiple variables that are adjusted independently.

One benefit of styles that contain variables is the ease of creating shades from base colors. Adding a base color with an overlaying black or white transparency can now be done with separate variables and provides the opportunity for quick color adjustments.

For example, our design system includes many shades of a brand color. Adjusting the base brand color automatically updates the corresponding dark and light shades. Previously, this change was less efficient and required multiple manual updates across styles.

This feature extends to gradient styles, where we can define color stops within the gradient itself. Leveraging variables within styles means that as your brand definition evolves, the tedium of rework decreases.

Variables in Text Styles

For typographic systems, we can define new variables and apply them to our text styles. Creating typographic variables allows us to define a set of rules that are specific to the use case. Imagine being able to go back and quickly update your typographic variables as new features are added, like calculations: e.g. 16px * 1rem. While calculations are not currently available, working with variables prepares us for increasing automation of tedious workflows.

Variables in Auto Layout

Consider leveraging variables in auto layout. Creating new layout specific variables allows you to quickly define visual rules for padding, spacing and margins. By taking the variable approach you will promote a more thoughtful and consistent application in regards to layout.

Using spacing variables across your design system significantly reduces the need for rework across multiple components and maintains greater design cohesion.

Recap

We hope this overview has shown the benefits of creating consistency across your design system with variables. This information should also help you discuss with stakeholders why investing time in defining design system details reduces the impact of future rework and iteration.

Adapting to new features like variables isn’t specific to Figma. Variables are simply an approach to bridging the gap between designers and developers with defined values. They encourage designers to think responsibly about their designs with the end goal of a maintainable approach.

Remember to stay updated on the latest features to remain ahead of the automation curve, and to consider why these features exist in the first place.


There are a few ongoing debates in the world of digital design. Things like Should designers code?”, “What’s the value of design?”, “UX versus UI,” and, perhaps most fundamentally, “Is everyone a designer?” To get a taste for the flavor of that last one, you can step into this Twitter thread from a little while back (TLDR: It didn’t go super well for anyone):

To be clear at the outset, I don’t care if everyone is a designer. However, I’ve been considering this debate for a while and I think there is something interesting here that’s worth further inspection: Why is design a lightning rod for this kind of debate? This doesn’t happen with other disciplines (at least not to the extent it does with design). Few people are walking around asserting that everyone is an engineer, or a marketer, or an accountant, or a product manager. I think the reason sits deep within our societal value system.

Design, as a term, is amorphous. Technically you can design anything from an argument to an economic system and everything in between, and you can do it with any process you see fit. We apply the idea of design to so many things that, professionally, it’s basically a meaningless term without the addition of some modifier: experience design, industrial design, interior design, architectural design, graphic design, fashion design, systems design, and so on. Each is its own discipline with its own practices, terms, processes, and outputs. However, even with its myriad applications and definitions, the term “design” does carry a set of foundational, cultural associations: agency and creativity. The combination of these associations makes it ripe for debates of ownership.

Agency


To possess agency means to have the ability to affect outcomes. Without agency we’re just carried by the currents, waiting to see where we end up. Agency is control, and deep down we all want to feel like we have control. Over time our cultural conversation has romanticized design, unlike any other discipline, as the epicenter of agency, a crossroads where creativity and planning translate into action.

At its core, design is the act of applying structure to a set of materials or elements in order to achieve a specific outcome. This is a fundamental human need. It’s not in our nature to leave things unstructured. Even the concept of “unstructured play” simply means providing space for a child to design (structure) their own play experience — the unstructured part of it is just us (adults) telling ourselves to let go of our own desire to design and let the kids have a turn. We hand agency to the child so they can practice wielding it.

There are few, if any, activities that carry the same deep tie to the concept of agency that design does. This is partially why no one cares to assert things like we’re all marketers or we’re all engineers. They don’t carry the same sense of agency. Sure, engineers have the ability to make something tangible, but someone had to design that thing first. You can “design” the code that goes into what you are building, but you do not have the agency to determine what is being built (unless you are also designing it).

If we really break it down, nearly every job in existence is either a job where you are designing, or a job where you are completing a set of tasks in service to something that was designed, or a job where your tasks are made possible by some aspect of design, or some mix of the three. Either way, the act of “designing” is what dictates the outcomes.

Creativity


The other key aspect of our cultural definition of design is creativity. Being creative is a deep value of modern society. We lionize the creatives, in the arts as well as in business. And creativity has become synonymous with innovation. There is a reason that for most people, Steve Wozniak is a bit player in the story of Steve Jobs.

The idea of what it means for an individual to be creative is something that has shifted over time. In her TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the changing association of creative “genius.” The historical concept, from ancient Greece and Rome, was that a person could have a genius, meaning that they were a conduit for some external creative force. The creative output was not their own; they were merely a vessel selected to make a creative work tangible. Today, we talk about people being a genius, meaning they are no longer a conduit for a creative force, but instead they are the creative force and the output of their creativity is theirs.

This seemingly minor semantic shift is actually seismic in that it makes creativity something that can be possessed and, as such, coveted. We now aspire to creativity in the same way we aspire to wealth. We teach it and nurture it (to varying degrees) in schools. And in professional settings, having the ability to be “creative” in your daily work is often viewed as a light against the darkness of mundane drudgery. As we see it today, everyone possesses some level of creativity, and fulfillment is found in expressing it. When we can’t get that satisfaction from our jobs we find hobbies and other activities to fulfill our creative needs.

So, our cultural concept of design makes tangible two highly desirable aspects of human existence: agency and creativity. Combine this with the amorphous nature of the term “design” and suddenly “designer” becomes a box that anyone can step into and many people desire to step into. This sets up an ongoing battle over the ownership of design. We just can’t help ourselves.

—

Take again, as proxy, our approach to the arts. While we lionize musicians, actors, artists, and other creators, we simultaneously feel compelled to take ownership of their work, critiquing it, questioning their creative decisions, and making demands based on our own desires. The constant list of demands and grievances from Star Wars fans is a perfect example. Or the fans who get upset if a band doesn’t play their favorite hit song at a show. Even deeper, we feel a universal right to remix things, cover things, and steal things.

Few people want to own the nuts-and-bolts process of designing, but everyone wants to have their say on the final output.

But just like other things we covet, what we desire is ownership over the output, not the process of creating it. For example, we’re willing to illegally download music, movies, books, games, software, fonts, and images en masse, dismissing the work it took to create it and sidestepping the requirement to compensate the creator.

A similar phenomenon occurs in the world of design. Few people want to own the nuts-and-bolts process of designing, but everyone wants to have their say on the final output. And because design represents the manifestation of agency and creativity there is an expectation that all of that feedback will be heard and incorporated. Pushing back on someone’s design feedback is not just questioning their opinion, it’s a direct assault on their sense of agency.

As a result, final designs are often a Frankenstein of feedback and opinions from everyone involved in the design process. In contrast, it’s rare to see an engineer get feedback on the way code should be written from a person who doesn’t have “engineer” in their title. It’s also even more rare to see an engineer feel compelled to actually take that sort of feedback and incorporate it.

Another place this kind of behavior crops up is in the medical world. Lots of people love to give out health advice or question the decisions of doctors. However, few people would say “everyone is a physician.”

And I think this represents a critical point. There are two reasons that people do not assert that they are a physician unless they are actually a physician:

  1. We have made a cultural decision that practicing medicine is too risky to allow just anyone to do it. You can go to jail for practicing medicine without a license.
  2. No one actually wants to be responsible for the potential life and death consequences of the medical advice they give.

This highlights a third aspect of our cultural definition of design: Design is frivolous. Despite the connection between design and agency, many still view “designing” as trite and superficial.

Humans are sensory creatures. We absorb much of the world around us through visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory inputs. Because of this, when we think of the agency inherent in design most of us think about it in terms of the aesthetic value of the output. Basically, we continually conflate design with art. If you don’t believe me, watch any episode of Abstract on Netflix. This is also why design programs are still housed in art schools.

So when most people critique designs, their focus is on aesthetics—colors, fonts, shape—and their reactions are based on the feelings and emotions those aesthetic values elicit. While aesthetics have an important role to play, they are only a piece of the overall puzzle. It is much harder for people to substantively critique the functional merits of a design or understand the potential impacts a design decision can have. That is partially why so many of our design decisions end up excluding certain groups of users or creating other unexpected negative consequences: We don’t critique our decisions through that lens.

Everyone is a designer because there is no perceived ramification for practicing design.

Because of this narrow, aesthetic-based view, the outcomes of the design process feel relatively inconsequential to many people, especially in comparison to something like the outcomes of a medical diagnosis. And if there are no consequences, why shouldn’t we all participate? Everyone is a designer because there is no perceived ramification for practicing design.

Of course, in reality, there are major consequences for the design decisions we make. Consequences that are more significant, on a population level, than many medical decisions a doctor makes.

What I’ve come to realize is that the idea that everyone is a designer is not really about some territorial fight for ownership; it’s actually a symptom of our broken culture of technology. Innovation (creativity) is our cultural gold standard. We push for it at all costs and we can’t be bothered by the repercussions. Design is the tool that gives form to that relentless drive. In a world of blitzscaling and “move fast and break things” it serves us to believe that our decisions have no consequences. If we truly acknowledged that our choices have real repercussions on people’s lives, then we would have to dismantle our entire approach to product development.

Today, “everyone is a designer” is used to maintain the status quo by perpetuating the illusion that we can operate with impunity, in a consequence-free fantasy land. It’s a statement that our decisions have no weight, so anyone can make them.

I said at the beginning that I don’t care if everyone is a designer, and I mean that. If we keep thinking of this debate as some territorial pissing match then we continue to abdicate our real responsibility, which is to be accountable for the things we create.

It really doesn’t matter who is designing. The only thing that matters is that we change our cultural conversation around the consequences of design. If we get real about the weight and impact that design decisions have on our world, and we all still want to take on the risk and responsibility that comes with that agency, then more power to all of us.

—

“Why the ‘Everyone Is a Designer’ Debate Is Beside the Point” was originally published in Medium on January 22, 2020.

Ask a designer who the most important stakeholder in their design process is and they will dutifully answer “the user.” It’s been drilled into us that our job is to represent the people who will use our products. We “empathize” with them and put their needs in the center of our decision-making process.

On paper, this sounds great, and many organizations wear the badge of human-centered design with pride. But when you take a step back and start to consider all the negative consequences that are created by these very same organizations, it becomes clear that something is amiss.

How could a process predicated on empathizing with people result in things like rampant data manipulation and exploitation, addictive features that hijack human psychology, systemic abuse, disenfranchisement, and predatory dark patterns? The answer is that it can’t. This can only mean one thing: We aren’t actually practicing human-centered design. And, unfortunately, the more established your company, the truer this statement is. As companies scale up, as they all strive to do, their priorities and incentives become less and less aligned with the people using their products.

The dehumanization of design

Taking an idea from concept to business means moving through a series of gates. In the Silicon Valley model the gates look something like this:

  1. Develop an initial product concept and launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
  2. Iterate on MVP to reach product/market fit.
  3. Scale up.
  4. Cash out

Driven by venture capital money, the goal is to cross these gates as quickly as possible. They’ve even coined a phrase for it: “blitzscaling.”
The problem is that as a company moves through each gate, the organization and its underlying incentives fall farther out of alignment with the needs of the people using the product and align more and more with the needs of the business. While an org may preach human-centered design, this growing imbalance of incentives and priorities runs counter to the tenets of that practice and makes it increasingly difficult to maintain them. Here is my generalized representation of how that looks:


Let’s walk through each phase to get a sense for what this means. We are going to use the example of a ride-sharing app to illustrate the point.

1. Initial concept development/MVP

If human-centered design exists in any phase, this is it. We discover a real problem that people are having in the real world and we set out to solve it.

Maybe you notice that it’s not easy to get a ride home from college if you don’t have a car, and you want to solve that problem. At this stage your design challenge might be something like:

How can we make it easier for people to get a ride without needing their own car?

This is a people problem. Addressing this problem means understanding the larger human context behind it and then developing a solution that delivers real-world value. That is human-centered design.

In this case, you decide to create an app that allows people to share rides. You design, test, and prototype with potential customers, build your MVP, and launch it into the world.

This step of the process is as customer-focused as you will likely ever be. Your vision is clear and competing priorities are incredibly limited. All you want is for your solution to solve a real human problem. Ironically, this is also the moment where human-centered design begins to die.

2. Reach product/market fit

As soon as your MVP is live, the incentives underlying the design process change dramatically. Provided your solution isn’t completely off base (in which case you basically move back to phase one) the next step for your app is to improve the experience and iterate on the feature set.

This shifts your focus away from the external human context of the problem and narrows it to the internal product context. You aren’t solving real-world problems anymore; you are solving product-based problems that you created with the way you designed your solution. In our ride-sharing app example, a problem in this phase might be something like:

How do we make it easier for riders to rate drivers?

This is a product problem. It didn’t exist until you created it. Yes, it is affecting people and addressing it means you need to understand the behavior of those people, but only within the context of your product. This may feel like a subtle difference from the MVP phase, but it is a critical distinction. This is a key first step in dehumanizing the design process. First, it represents a narrowing of our view of who the people we are designing for are. We begin to form a bubble where “understanding the user” means understanding their interaction with the product, not understanding the context of their life. This is the step where “humans” become “users,” and the way they interact with the business becomes how they are defined.

Second, this is where we start to introduce numbers, in the form of engagement metrics, as a proxy for people, creating a new layer of separation between us and them. For example, in the case of the driver rating problem above, our key indicator of success will not be based on individualized feedback, but rather on whether or not the overall percentage of riders who rate their driver goes up. This kind of measurement is unavoidable, but we rarely acknowledge its dehumanizing effect. Users become an amorphous blob masked behind our business metrics.

While this kind of product problem is still largely focused on user issues, the business-centric context shift alters our definition of what’s important and primes us to focus more on business needs.

3. Scale up

Once a product has traction, the question becomes “How do we grow?” This introduces a new focus: maximizing key growth metrics. In the case of our ride-sharing app a problem in this phase might be:

How do we increase the number of rides people take?

This is a business problem. No human is walking around saying, “Man, I wish I had to use my ride-sharing app more often!” This type of problem is the antithesis of a human-centered problem.

In order to increase rides, you either need to squeeze more value out of existing customers, convince new people to start taking rides, or both. While some of this is about driving awareness, much of it centers on convincing people that they have a problem, or in the worst case, actively creating new problems. This is no longer about uncovering an unmet need and developing a solution.

It is this step where things can really start to turn and those negative externalities emerge. This is the realm of addictive product loops, invasive notifications, email drip campaigns, dark pattern tricks, data manipulation, and whatever else we characterize as growth hacking these days. It’s countdown timers in checkout flows, 0% down offers, Prime Day, and planned obsolescence. A lot of the advertising world makes its hay here as well.

When teams are incentivized solely around moving metrics all manner of unsavory things become fair game.

Solving these problems means you are designing to extract value, not to deliver it. To “understand the user” in this context means understanding how to change or manipulate their behavior in order to move a metric. When teams are incentivized solely around moving metrics, all manner of unsavory things become fair game. This is where your ride-sharing app might develop something like Greyball.

4. Cash out

This is the last gate. You now have a successful product operating at scale. Your new problem — and the core focus of the organization — becomes:

How do we maximize our market value?

This is a market problem. The goal is to position the company in the best light possible for IPO or acquisition, or some other liquidity event. This is the final step in dehumanizing the design process. You are now designing for the investor.

The most likely outcome for the people using your product is not some new solution to a real problem they have, but a doubling down on the extractive tactics you employed while scaling. Make no mistake: Growth hacking is not some short-term stop-gap; it’s like a drug. Once you get hooked there is no turning back. You’ve created a beast that must be fed, and good luck getting off that treadmill. So for many, this becomes the new normal, and negative externalities become the cost of doing business.

It doesn’t stop once you cash out, either. If you go IPO, for example, you are legally obligated to prioritize increasing investor value for as long as you are in the public market. If you get acquired, it’s likely to be by some other publicly-traded company under the same requirements. The idea that you could swing back to focusing on the needs of your customer at this point is foolishly idealistic.

—

The principles of human-centered design evolved over decades, but it really took hold in the 1990s, when it was popularized by IDEO and other design consultancies. Human-centered design is the perfect tool for a consultancy like IDEO, which takes on the task of uncovering new problems and proposing new solutions. It’s also why this mode of design works so well in the first phase of product development. But consultancies rarely build and scale things; in fact, they almost never leave the first gate. Building and scaling is up to the client. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way the relationship works.

But what this means is that human-centered design is not something you can just drop into any organization and expect it to improve outcomes for customers. For a lot of companies with existing products, the concept doesn’t fundamentally align with the incentives of the org. It’s also why it becomes increasingly difficult for teams who employed human-centered design principles early in the life of a company to effectively maintain the practice long-term. The growing misalignment of incentives creates major headwinds to selling through and leveraging the resulting insights. There are too many competing priorities, and the context through which the company views “the user” fundamentally changes. This is where things break down and bad things can happen.

Negative externalities emerge as “human-centered” technology platforms grow because the reality is that their focus shifts deeper and deeper into business-centric thinking. The bubble that begins to form when we move from creating an MVP to focusing on “product problems” only gets bigger over time, and teams become increasingly disconnected from the real world. It’s a slippery slope where the problems of the business overtake the problems of the humans the business serves, and it warps our perspective.

Delivering real human value isn’t a benchmark for business success. Instead, success is defined by speed, scale, and growth.

This is an incentives issue deeply rooted in our culture of technology. Delivering real human value isn’t a benchmark for business success. Instead, success is defined by speed, scale, and growth. When an entire business is incentivized to scale at all costs, it takes a lot of effort and intention to separate yourself from that context. It’s unnervingly easy to be swept along not realizing how far things have drifted from your original goals. When we do talk to customers, it’s shaded by this context. Our research goals are driven by the needs of the business. We ask the questions that will get us the answers to complete our current task.

The first step to solving all this is awareness and being willing to have honest conversations with ourselves. If we hide our heads in the sand and insist that everything we do is human-centered, we are less likely to question our choices and the choices of those around us. But awareness is just the first step.

If we ever want to truly align the kind of design we say we do with the kind of design we actually do, we need to be willing to question our cultural definition of success. Reaching for scale and endless growth drives us to do unnatural things as we lose sight of the human value we were trying to deliver. As the negative impacts of our technology choices continue to grow, it’s time to consider that speed, scale, and growth are flimsy proxies for success.

—

“Human-Centered Design Dies at Launch” was originally published in Medium on July 31, 2019.

SCENE: AFTER HOURS IN A DARK CO-WORKING SPACE

FADE IN:

INT. DARK CO-WORKING SPACE — NIGHT

A solitary figure sits in front of a laptop, the only light source in the dimly lit room. Our protagonist, an innovative entrepreneur, is determined and focused.

Their face illuminated by the screen, the entrepreneur navigates the treacherous waters of the business world. Each keystroke is a testament to their resilience in facing countless challenges.

Tight deadlines, limited funding, investor expectations, and ever-changing regulations are just a few obstacles our main character must overcome. The market’s volatility adds to the chaos.

But the true test lies ahead as our protagonist faces their most formidable adversary yet: a behemoth competitor with seemingly bottomless pockets.

As tension mounts and stakes rise, our entrepreneur must dig deep, summoning every ounce of creativity and cunning to outsmart their well-funded rival.

FADE OUT

Launching a startup is akin to diving headfirst into an action-packed thriller, where each twist and turn brings new challenges, adrenaline-pumping moments, and the constant pursuit of triumph against all odds. In the dynamic world of startups, crafting a compelling narrative isn’t just about telling a story; it’s about creating an experience that resonates with your audience.

Like the art of filmmaking, entrepreneurship demands a compelling narrative and a deep connection with its audience. The magic of cinema captivates us with diverse stories and experiences; startups must also craft narratives that resonate with their target market. While studio blockbusters rely on massive marketing budgets, independent films thrive on the strength of their storytelling and buzz.

Like an indie film, most startups lack the funding to build and promote a product at a “blockbuster” level. So, they need to be scrappy and creative in leveraging the resources they have at their disposal. In both realms, success hinges on telling a story that engages, inspires, and connects with the audience. Without generous investors or a long runway, startups can still reach the next growth stage with the right strategy.

As entrepreneurs, the challenge lies in crafting a strategy that ensures product-market fit and fosters a meaningful connection with customers — just like a major movie producer bringing their vision to life on the silver screen.

SCENE: Navigating the hurdles of the competitive tech landscape

Startups face an uphill battle, navigating the relentless demands of limited resources, tight time constraints, and the imperative for rapid innovation, underscoring the unique challenges they endure amidst the broader business landscape. Building an experienced team within budget constraints while ensuring efficient product development poses significant hurdles.

Overlooking UX design in the early stages of product development can lead to disastrous outcomes, including negative user feedback, low adoption rates, and difficulty attracting investors. The startup failure rate is staggering, highlighting the critical need for strategic UX integration.

Navigating critical growth stages, startups require seasoned expertise to innovate and develop new products effectively. While entry-level staff may offer fresh insights, their limited hands-on experience necessitates significant guidance and strategic direction, demanding valuable time and energy from founders and ultimately hindering the development of meaningful strategies.

SCENE: Design intentionally to gain a competitive advantage and drive growth

Startups can leverage UX design to gain a competitive edge, attract and retain customers, build brand loyalty, and increase market share. By prioritizing intuitive and user-centric design principles, startups can mitigate risks, accelerate learning curves, and position themselves for success.

These principles include:

  1. An iterative design process that focuses on testing and learning.
  2. Feature prioritization that drives toward focused, high-value delivery for customers.
  3. Rapid prototyping to get continual feedback from potential customers.
  4. A technology approach that prioritizes efficiency and scalability.

Executing against these principles takes intentionality. Startups can start from the ground up by assembling an internal team, which means finding individuals who can design, prototype, code, conduct research, provide strategic insights, and more. Another approach is finding an experienced product design partner who can help companies confidently navigate the complexities of product innovation.

At Design Like You Mean It (DLYMI), we operate like an on-demand film crew, gathering collaborative teams experienced in their respective disciplines to work on projects. With a proven track record and insights from different industries and organizations, we are a special ops team offering extensive UX/UI expertise and years of collective knowledge to propel your company toward its next growth phase.

At DLYMI, we understand startups’ unique challenges and offer collaborative, human-centered design solutions tailored to your needs. We aim to empower startups to create thoughtful digital experiences that drive growth and innovation.

Startups and entrepreneurs are the lifeblood of innovation, job creation, and economic growth. By embracing UX design as a strategic imperative, startups can unlock their full potential, turning their stories into blockbuster successes that resonate with audiences worldwide. It’s time to spotlight the transformative power of UX design in the startup ecosystem.

SCENE: AFTER HOURS IN A DARK CO-WORKING SPACE

FADE IN:

INT. DARK CO-WORKING SPACE — NIGHT

Our protagonist sits hunched over, eyes fixed on the glowing screen. Fatigue is evident as our main character blinks hard, finally tearing their gaze away from the monitor.

After hours of intense research and meticulous review, the brave entrepreneur has an epiphany. The potential cost and efficiency benefits of hiring an “on-demand film crew” will consolidate many skills without the burden of filling each role individually.

Determinedly, the protagonist identifies the perfect partner to bring their vision to life, setting the stage for the venture to become a blockbuster success.

In a moment of triumph, our main character peaks the story’s climax, gaining a crucial competitive edge against the behemoth competitor with bottomless pockets.

In relief, our protagonist closes the laptop, knowing that experienced designers will help accelerate the learning curve.

FADE OUT

Late last year, I wrote a piece titled “Design Won’t Save the World.” It focused on the limits of human-centered design and its failure to impact the big problems we face. The morning the piece was published, my wife sat in our living room reading through it. When she finished she said, “we need bee-centered design.” Since that moment I’ve been thinking about what that would mean.

Wikipedia defines human-centered design (HCD) as “a design and management framework that develops solutions to problems by involving the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process.”

Hasn’t our entire existence been about involving the human perspective in all steps of the process? I mean, at one point we literally believed that we were the center of the universe. Empirically we’ve figured out that we’re not the center of everything but practically, we pretty much still carry on as if we are. We are very aware of the vast and powerful interplay between the parts and pieces that surround us, but we continue to see the world as one big show unfolding in service to us. When you get right down to it, human-centered design is just an extension of this belief in both name and execution.

Humans have a lot of problems that need solving — and we should try to solve those problems. But humans don’t exist in isolation; we are but one very small piece in a very large puzzle. While centering the human perspective can help foster more humane design outcomes, it also perpetuates myopic navel-gazing.

By centering on the human perspective, we also center our narrow definition of success.

When we observe a problem that impacts people, our process dictates that we solve it. Very often, these solutions are developed in isolation, exclusively from the human perspective. This creates a solutions-at-all costs mentality in which we often ignore any risk of broader impacts, rarely asking ourselves if the problem should even be solved in the first place. This inward-looking approach leads to a lot of human-centered solutions — but it also leads to a lot of collateral damage to the larger systems around us.

By centering the human perspective, we also center our narrow definition of success. We believe that business metrics and economic growth are the end-all, be-all of human progress. But when we infuse that belief into all steps of the problem-solving process, it becomes the frame through which we view all outcomes. In many cases, a solution is not deemed successful unless it carries a financial upside. (This doesn’t have to mean actual revenue; it can simply mean shareholder value, as we see with many web companies.) Whether the solution solves the original problem or not is almost entirely irrelevant. This prioritization of profits over progress puts a ceiling on the amount of real, human value we can actually deliver. It also papers over any resulting collateral damage.

While centering the human perspective has allowed us to make important gains, it doesn’t scale. In an interdependent system, continually over-prioritizing the needs and desires of a single component will eventually cause the entire system to collapse.

It’s time for us to broaden our perspective. We need to start looking beyond the ends of our own noses.

What is bee-centered design?

So, what does bee-centered design really look like? I’ve realized that it’s not necessarily a literal concept. We don’t gain anything by actually putting bees at the center of our decision-making processes, or by spending lots of time creating solutions to problems that the bees didn’t even know they had. Rather, it’s about shifting our mindset to open up a much-needed new perspective for the things we create.

The “canary in the coal mine” mentality

The scale of our impact on the environment is enormous. In our current design paradigm, we largely assess that impact based on short-term outcomes for ourselves. If something doesn’t kill us immediately, we’ll give it a thumbs-up. But we are the strongest link in the chain and in an interdependent system, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Unfortunately, our approach to design has been knocking off weak links left and right.

So far, we have largely shielded ourselves from this downside with our technical resilience. But there is a limit to what we can withstand.

Bees are a sentinel species. They are more fragile and susceptible to environmental changes than species further up the food chain, and their health is an early indicator of impending ecological issues. If our design process shifted to center them, or to focus on other weaker links, we would have to consider the impacts of our actions beyond our immediate health and safety. This small change could mean a complete shift in our tolerance for risk, and in our patterns of creation and consumption.

This principle isn’t just about sustainability; it’s also about the quality of our design solutions. In a previous career, I was a health inspector. The regulations I used to enforce food safety were developed based upon risk tolerances aimed to protect the most vulnerable among us: young children, the elderly, and the immunocompromised. While this system created a more stringent set of rules, it also made the rules significantly more effective. A standard set to protect a baby will almost always protect a healthy adult.

Nothing we create exists in isolation; it all lives within the overall natural system. If we architect our solutions with tolerances that support the more vulnerable aspects of that system, we’ll actually craft a more effective solution. If we design for the health of the canary in the coal mine, we will also be designing for the health of the miner.

A common goal

Bees work in service of their hives. The hive system delivers maximum value because everyone feeds into it and moves in the same direction. The key to the hive’s effectiveness is that every bee within it has a clear view of where they are going. Humans don’t have that; on the whole, we don’t have shared goals. The closest thing we have is the profit motive (and, I guess, basic survival).

Where are we going and to what end? Are we just making shit for the hell of it? Do we want to pile up money? Solve all human problems? Fill every possible niche with a product? These are obviously big questions but they aren’t questions that our existing design frameworks even remotely try to address.

We’re trained to ask questions — but why don’t we question the validity and value of our obsession with solving problems that affect only us?

Instead, our current frameworks root us in processes and problems. Design thinking, for example, is rooted in “empathy, optimism, iteration, creative confidence, experimentation, and an embrace of ambiguity and failure.” This is all about process, not outcomes. It provides a playbook for how to find problems and steps for how to develop solutions, but it doesn’t guide the outcomes for those solutions. It doesn’t get us all moving in the same direction.

What if the core of our design framework was rooted in a set of universal outcomes? What if we had a common set of goals to pull toward, regardless of what product we’re designing or what industry we’re working in? These goals could be built around things like empowerment, inclusivity, sustainability, equity, and opportunity. They could become a base filter through which we evaluate all of our designs.

Having collective goals would not negate the need for process altogether. Instead, it would ground that process in a shared ethos, amplifying the power of all of our efforts in a common direction rather than pushing each of us to grasp in isolation for something greater.

Widening our view of the world

Bee-centered design would also, quite simply, widen our view of the world. It would mean taking a moment to get out of our human bubble and look around. We’ve told ourselves so many stories about the way things are supposed to be; those stories play on autopilot every time we create something. We’re trained to ask questions — but why don’t we question the validity and value of our obsession with solving problems that affect only us?

Why do our companies need to become monopolies in order to win? Why do our products need to maximize engagement? Why is convincing people to upgrade every 12 months a good thing?

Does every product deserve to exist? Does every problem need to be solved?

Human-centered thinking keeps us locked in our human-centered bubble. We need to break out.

—

“Human-Centered Design Is Broken. Here’s a Better Alternative.” was originally published in Medium on March 27, 2019.

“Design can change the world.”

When I was in design school, this statement filled me with incredible energy and pride. I felt it in my core. How could I not? Over the last few decades, design — and design thinking — has ascended to the point of being routinely viewed as one of the differentiators for companies and products.

Behind this ascension lies design’s anointed operating system: human-centered design.

The fundamental idea behind human-centered design is that, to find the best solution, designers need to develop an empathetic understanding of the people they are designing for.

Designers do this through user interviews, contextual observations (watching users go about their business in their “normal” life), and a number of other tools that help designers put themselves in users’ shoes. Once you can paint an empathetic picture of a user’s needs, the next step in the process is to identify a few key insights and use those to create a solution.

One famous example is the development of the Swiffer mop. Designers, tasked with improving the process of housecleaning, observed customers cleaning their homes. A key insight was that time was critical. Cleaning often cut into time for other activities, and any time savings would be a boon. Mopping was identified as an especially time-consuming part of cleaning, with multiple steps and multiple pieces of equipment, not to mention waiting for the floor to dry. So designers created a “dry mop” (the Swiffer) that simplified the process and saved time. It was a huge commercial success.

Straightforward enough.

And the process works. Countless products and services that drive our daily lives were either born from this process or dramatically improved by it. Smartphones and many of their apps, social media services like Instagram and Twitter. The darlings of the sharing economy — Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Not to mention a litany of physical products.

The way the world works and the way we work in it are fundamentally different today than they were even a decade ago. In large part, this is due to the process of human-centered design.

So, we as designers puff out our chests and carry our heads high knowing that we have the power to change the world.

But, if you step back for a moment, you start to see a problem: We’ve been designing the world, real hard, for decades now and we haven’t made a dent in a single real problem.

What do I mean by “real problem”?

I mean real problems. The big ones. The kind that shake us to the core of our humanity and threaten our long-term viability.

Hunger. Climate change. Poverty. Income inequality. Illiteracy. Bigotry. Discrimination. Environmental degradation. The list goes on.

Right now, there are people in the richest country on Earth who are starving. People who can’t access or afford health care. People who are homeless. That’s the richest country.

Right now, our oceans are choking to death from plastics. Our atmosphere is choking to death from CO2, and we have effectively lost 50 percent of the Earth’s biodiversity.

Guess what: Design hasn’t fixed any of it.

Not even the slightest bit.

And, unfortunately, design won’t fix any of it, because our operating system won’t allow it.

The Problem with Human-Centered Design

Big problems, those that threaten our existence or the stability of our society, are systemic. They coarse through the veins of the entire system. Their causes are widespread and varied, and the people involved represent almost every segment of society.

These kinds of problems are multifaceted. They do not have a silver bullet. There is no “ah-ha” insight hiding out there that will suddenly help us solve the problem and see the light.

Instead, solving these kinds of systemic problems is like trying to contain a wildfire. While you’re working to fight one side of it, the other side has just burned another 50 square miles. You can’t hope to make progress by chipping away at one piece of the problem while ignoring the others.

Eventually, like a wildfire, you try to mitigate as much damage as possible until the weather shifts and a rainstorm comes along, providing a truly systemic solution. A solution that addresses the problem from all sides.

Human-centered design is not architected to solve systemic problems. In fact, human-centered design is architected to solve the exact opposite type of problem.

Human-centered design is all about focus. It’s about observing the big picture and then zeroing in on a manageable set of insights and variables, and solving for those. By definition, this means the process pushes the designer to actively ignore many of a problem’s facets. And this kind of myopic focus doesn’t work when you’re trying to solve something systemic.

A recent study on ride-sharing apps, a category of companies heavy on user-centered design, found that ride sharing adds 2.6 vehicle miles to city traffic for every one mile of personal driving removed. Ride-sharing apps actually make traffic in cities worse.

Ride-sharing companies, like Lyft, were predicated on the idea that they could put a dent in the problem of human transportation by solving for traffic congestion, and they used human-centered design approaches to do it. How could they have gone wrong?

It’s obvious. Human transportation is not a focused problem, it is a significant systemic issue. Through a human-centered design process, ride-sharing apps landed on the insight that getting a cab, or finding a ride, was inefficient in many cities. They focused on this insight and then, as their process is designed to do, shut out the other facets of the problem.

They concluded: “If we can make getting a ride more efficient, less people will drive their own cars, reducing traffic.”

This is the kind of simplified, guiding statement human-centered design produces.

And guess what? Uber and Lyft succeeded in making it easier to get a ride. Human-centered design works for a consumer-facing problem like that. In the process, however, they overlooked other aspects of the transportation ecosystem.

For example, as the study found, many people use non-automobile transportation, like bikes, buses, and trains, specifically because they don’t have a car (and getting a ride is a pain). Once ride-sharing apps made it easier to get a car, people who’d previously used public transportation began to opt for car-based travel. Human-centered design’s myopic focus kept this non-auto population obscured from view during the design process. This is an example of just one of the problem facets left out of the solution.

A user-centered approach is great for figuring out how to make the experience better for Airbnb customers, or how to change the way people mop. But it cannot contain a systemic problem like human transportation. When faced with a big, hairy, multifaceted problem, our focused, iterative operating system is abysmally inadequate. Human-centered design can barely handle damage control.

And so we inch our way forward. Chipping away at one side while the other burns out of control.

What Do We Need Instead?

I’m not saying we need to abolish human-centered design. It works for what it’s designed for. We have way better mops now (among many other things), and that’s wonderful. But, we need to understand the limits of our tools and begin to think about new ones. Tools that can help us grok the breadth and complexity of really big problems — and start to solve for them systemically.

Some in the design field are working on moving human-centered design forward. IDEO, one of the progenitors of human-centered design, is pushing a new concept: Circular Design. The idea behind Circular Design is to start thinking about designed objects through the lens of a “circular economy.” No longer driven by a create and dispose mentality, but a create and reuse mentality. It’s a rebrand of the cradle to cradle concept, focused on sustainability.

While this is an important step forward, it falls short of the systemic design thinking we need. Like the myopic aspect of human-centered design, Circular Design still drives toward focused design insights from which to create solutions. The difference? It asks the designer to consider the full life cycle of a solution and its long-term impact. Again, this is an indisputably important shift in the culture of design, but will it truly solve big problems?

If I design for the full life cycle of my reusable water bottle, I may have a more sustainable water bottle, but I have not created a systemic solution for our plastics problem. I have not changed the economic incentives driving plastic culture. I have not solved for the distribution and financial issues that make single-use bottled water more accessible. I have not solved for the public health issues that make single-use bottled water significantly safer in many areas. And I have not solved for all the other applications of single-use plastics.

I’m back to damage control. And the fire keeps getting bigger.

How Can We Break the Mold?

If we extend the wildfire analogy, perhaps we can create a design framework that allows us to more rapidly innovate in small ways across all facets of a problem, instead of trying to focus on a select few. Like a rainstorm, lots of tiny drops — delivered in a coordinated fashion — can extinguish a very large fire.

Or maybe it’s about getting rid of our culture of competition and creating a new culture of collaboration. If we start ignoring the corporate and political silos separating us, we can collaboratively combine lots of focused solutions, allowing us to knit them together into a single tapestry that truly covers an entire problem. There are lots of solutions out there. We just don’t have a thread pulling them together.

Or maybe it’s about upending the economic incentives that drive design. Human-centered design was created to serve our current economic system. There’s money in creating a better mop. There isn’t money in solving homelessness. In order to thrive economically we needed to consistently design better mops, so we built a framework to do it.

If we had the right incentives, how quickly could we develop a framework for systemic design thinking?

Design can change the world. But the way we’re going about it right now isn’t cutting it. If we want to design our way out of the big issues, we need to take a critical look at our approach. We need to upgrade our innovation operating system.

—

“Design Won’t Save the World” was originally published in Medium on August 1, 2018.

There is so much that goes into pushing great design out into the world. A good place to start is getting the right personalities on your team. Now, no personality is without it’s downsides, but here are a few that I think can be pretty helpful. Keep in mind that these may not be individual people. Depending on the size of the team, they might be all rolled up into one.

1. The Perfectionist

No detail is too fine, no nuance too miniscule. The Perfectionist is the purveyor of consistency. The pusher of precision. They can spot a 2px spacing issue from three desks away, and lie in bed at night sweating about line lengths and font sizing.

Why you need them: Things can get crazy over the course of a project. As the number of files, layouts and versions grow the details can get sloppy. The Perfectionist is there to keep it all on the rails. If they aren’t doing the work themselves, include them in as many reviews as you can. I guarantee they’ll catch things no one else will.

2. The Visionary

The visionary is convinced you should be designing an Oculus Rift experience to control a 3D printed drone. They live on the bleeding edge and watch the latest trends. You may have trouble pulling them away from the latest Chrome experiment in order to get some actual work done.

Why you need them: A team’s energy ebbs and flows. The more you can keep people excited and energized the better their creative output. While a lot of ideas may not be feasible, the Visionary brings a steady dose of creative energy, inspiration and excitement to the table that can push the team to think outside the box and encourage people to go out on a limb.

3. The Closer

Designing is only half the battle. The rubber meets the road when it’s time to get a design from prototype (or comp) to actual living, breathing creature in the wild. That’s where the Closer comes in. The Closer is all about the nitty gritty. They have a deep, unending love for specs and annotations, and the technical know how to wade into detailed conversation with engineers. They are tough and persistent, with enough passion and dedication to push until the very end.

Why you need them: With all the demands on a design team it can be easy to “finish” a design, pass it over to engineering and move on to the next thing. But the best design teams put as much emphasis on shepherding their work through development as they do on designing the thing in the first place.

4. The Straight Shooter

Honesty is the best policy. The Straight Shooter believes this to the core. If they think something is good, they will tell you. If they think something is crap, they will tell you. Feelings be damned, they are going to give you their honest opinion, especially if they think it’s going to make the work better.

Why you need them: Honesty and critique are key to getting great design work out the door. Sometimes design teams can fall into a habit of sugar coating feedback and letting things slip through that might not be at the level you want. The Straight Shooter helps keep everyone accountable and makes it less likely that the team will develop bad critique habits.

5. The Wolf

“I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

Cool, calm and collected, the Wolf excels in high pressure situations. Creative workarounds and decisive problem solving are the Wolf’s forte. They are reliable, dedicated and level headed, with a killer instinct for cutting through drama to get to the heart of a problem.

Why you need them: Over the course of a project it is inevitable that something is going to blow up. Files get deleted. Scope creeps. Deadlines shift. If not addressed quickly, those things can completely derail a project. Fortunately, if you’ve got a Wolf on your team, you can rest easy. When the shit hits the fan, the Wolf knows how to keep the ship on course.

6. The Producer

Heads down, headphones on. When the Producer is in the zone, everyone knows to give them their space. The Producer is a wizard with their software of choice. They know all the shortcuts and are almost obsessive about streamlining their workflow. They are never more comfortable then when they are churning through work.

Why you need them: Sometimes you just need to get a lot done. Maybe you have to create a ton of content images to fit a new design, or you decided to make a change that now needs translated to all your templates across all your breakpoints. This is the Producer’s sweet spot. Just point them in the right direction and let ’em go.

7. The Politician

The Politician spends more time in meetings then they do in Sketch or Photoshop. But, the Politician thrives at doing the dirty work to sell the design vision, generate buy in, knock down barriers and shield the team from everything rolling down hill. Their ability to design is matched only by their ability to sell it. They manage up and down, carrying the flag of design to the highest levels and inspiring a shared vision throughout the organization.

Why you need them: The process of design is messy business. There are stakeholders to satisfy, a creative vision to maintain, deadlines to hit and expectations to manage. The Politician knows the playing field and the players and is adept at navigating the system. Without them, great design may never see the light of day.

FYI: If you are a team lead, this is probably you. If you haven’t yet, I’d suggest setting aside the next few days to binge some House of Cards :).

—

“7 Personalities You Need on Your Design Team” was originally published in Medium on December 28, 2015.

What is your design philosophy? — I was asked this question by a candidate during a recent job interview. Oddly, it was the first time I’d ever been asked that question. As I fumbled through an answer I realized I didn’t really have an articulated design philosophy, or at least not one that easily came to mind. So I decided remedy that.

1: There is art in design, but design is not art

There is a practiced art to creating great design, but the final output of the design process is not art. Art is creative expression intended to provoke questions and individual interpretation. Art is inspiring, emotional and important, but does not fill a specific need beyond humanities’ desire to express itself. Design, on the other hand, is a creative process intended to solve a problem, to fill a need for the people that will ultimately interact with it. Design should not be open to interpretation, but instead should define how it is to be engaged with and should guide a user at each stage of that engagement. Art creates questions, design creates answers.

2: Design must be rooted in reality

As Dieter Rams says, “Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. Empathy is the conduit to great design and the critical skill for great designers. Without a deep understanding of the end user and the reality in which a design will be used, any decision a designer makes is a shot in the dark. To fill a real need, design must be rooted in reality.

3: Design is never perfect

Design is about creating elegant solutions to address user needs. The tricky thing is that most often we are designing for humans, and humans are complicated. People’s expectations and desires evolve over time. Sometimes design evolves to meet these changes, sometimes design is the driver of the change. Regardless, a designer’s work is never done. This does not mean that design needs to be trendy, design can be timeless, but a great designer has a bent toward iteration and always has their ear to the ground.

4: Design is a set of tools, not a standardized process

Every problem presents its own unique set of characteristics, as such there is no one-size-fits-all process for coming to the best solution. The art of design is about having a diverse set of tools and approaches, and determining when to apply each. To quote Maslow, “…it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail” — so always carry a hammer, a screw driver, a pair of pliers and a hex wrench.

5: Design communicates obvious function

For something to be “well designed” it could be simple, or it could be complex. It could be considered aesthetically pleasing, or it could be considered gaudy. Aesthetics and simplicity are not requirements. For something to be well designed, the key requirement is that its function must be obvious. A person should be able to easily determine how to use and interact with it.

6: Design should delight

A design should create moments of delight for the people who encounter it. There is no steadfast rule as to what is delightful. Delight can come in different forms for different people, this is where empathy comes in, but most likely it is a mix of form, function and value that creates that often intangible emotional connection to a well designed thing.

—

That’s my first attempt at articulating a design philosophy. I’d love to hear how you’d answer the question — What is your design philosophy?

—

“What is Your Design Philosophy?” was originally published in Medium on December 21, 2015.

As the father of two tiny people, I’ve spent a lot of time with big purple dinosaurs, curious monkeys and little backpack wearing adventurers. Interestingly, I‘ve discovered that kids shows can teach us a lot about good product design, especially that Dora the Explorer.

  1. Make It Predictable

    Every episode of Dora is the same. There is a clear end goal and Dora has to go through three steps to get there. The goal and the steps are articulated (repeatedly) by Dora and her friends throughout the adventure. This repetitive structure makes the show extremely enjoyable for kids because they can master it. They get what needs to happen, they understand the steps to get there and they know what’s coming next.

    People are driven by a desire for mastery. We want to feel accomplished and capable. The easier it is for a person to master a product the more likely they are to feel good about the experience. Predictability goes a long way toward making that happen. There are a number of ways to make a product predictable:

    1. Maintain design consistency: Users should know what design elements mean, no matter where they appear in an experience. If tapping a specific icon is supposed to open a navigation menu, it needs to open that menu every time it appears. If it doesn’t, the user loses the ability to predict what the icon means and no longer knows when or how to use it.

    2. Leverage established design patterns: It can be enticing to get creative and reinvent the wheel, but using established design patterns for common tasks means less “new” for the user to learn.

    3. Use metaphors and animations: Well crafted metaphors and animations help users understand where they are in an experience, what state things are in, what options are available to them and what they should do next.
  1. Use Simple Language

    Dora is aimed at little kids so the language is simple and the dialogue is concise.

    Your product might not be aimed at kids but there is rarely a downside to simple and concise language. The average adult American reads at a 7th — 8th grade level. Unless your product or market demands technical jargon or higher-level vocabulary, avoid it. This is especially important to keep in mind with error messages, where lack of comprehension has a higher likelihood of leading to user frustration.
  1. Provide the Necessary Tools

    On every adventure, Dora inevitably runs into problems. Swiper the Fox steals something, or she has to get past snakes, or alligators, or whatever. But, the ever-resourceful Dora has it covered thanks to her magic, talking backpack and her equally magic, equally talky map. The map keeps her on the right track, and her backpack is full (conveniently) of just what she might need at any given moment.

    You can’t always predict what’s going to happen to your users in the wild. You can do your best to guide them down specific paths or toward specific outcomes, but people are complicated. They do what they want. And they will definitely do something you didn’t think of. It is important to always have a set of tools available to help them overcome problems they might encounter.

    This includes navigational tools to help get them back on track if they end up in the wrong place, as well as functional tools to help them accomplish tasks, make decisions, and undo mistakes. Delivering just what a user needs right when they need it makes for a magical experience. You might not be able to give them a magic, talking backpack, but if you are thoughtful about the way you surface and design your tools, you can come pretty damn close.

—

“The UX of Dora: 3 Design Lessons from a Little Adventurer” was originally published in Medium on March 1, 2015.

Coming out of school as newly minted designers, we often aspire to the heights of master craftsmanship. We envision ourselves creating expertly designed, meticulously implemented products that inspire awe with their beauty, artistry, and execution.

Then the real world promptly smacks us in the face.

Craftsmen spend untold hours creating their masterpieces. They sweat the details and pour their souls into the work. Their final creations are as much art as they are products.

Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship.

We, on the other hand, find ourselves saddled with impossible deadlines that require us to compromise on features and details. It’s all we can do just to get the project done. Our final products are minimum viable. They’re driven by the invisible hand of the market, which relentlessly demands speed so we can squeeze out a few more sales for the quarter. Getting a product out is considered better than getting it perfect.

The craftsman is not worried about speed. The craftsman is worried about the quality and value of the final product.

Somewhere in our industrialized rush, we’ve lost our sense of craftsmanship. To succeed in the future, we’ll need to find it again.

Do We Need Speed?

Speed is cancer to craftsmanship. But the idea that speed is a positive quality runs deep. Like, primordial deep. In the book Metaphors We Live By, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explain that our positive association with speed dates back to the dawn of humanity, when early man observed that healthy humans walked at a quicker pace than those who were not healthy. The rest, in our primitive lizard brains, is history. Fast is better than slow.

We haven’t evolved much past that.

We assume first to market is best. Yet, according to researchers at Northwestern, late entrants to a market are more successful than first-movers 70 percent of the time.

When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused.

We mythologize the fast, nimble startup that disrupts the lumbering, established market leader. But, like the plane crash that makes us question the safety of flying, these rare, widely covered stories do not represent the full picture. The average startup does not win the battle, regardless of how fast it moves. When Richard Branson weighed in on this, his advice for entrepreneurs was littered with words like long-term, carefully, and wisely. Those words don’t sound fast at all.

When a startup does win, it’s often not because they were fast, but because they were focused. Just as when a larger company is disrupted, it’s not necessarily because it was slow, but because it lacked focus as its business grew to multiple markets and products.

Focus, therefore, is more important than speed.

The Hare was faster than the Tortoise, but the Tortoise won because the Hare lost focus.

The Changing Complexion of the Market

The driving mantra of fast-moving tech companies is out is better than perfect. However, a seismic shift is happening in the way consumers think about products and what they’re willing to pay for. The shift means we may need to rethink that mantra.

Josh Allan Dykstra laid it out in his Fast Company article, “Why Millennials Don’t Want to Buy Stuff.”

To ‘own something’ in the traditional sense is becoming less important, because what’s scarce has changed. Ownership just isn’t hard anymore. We can now find and own practically anything we want, at any time, through the unending flea market of the Internet. Because of this, the balance between supply and demand has been altered, and the value has moved elsewhere.

I’d take this a step further. I don’t think this change is just about scarcity, I think it is also about quality. The world is flooded with worthless crap. Speed drives quantity over quality, and the durability and lifespan of our stuff has been steadily declining.

In the digital space, quality does not necessarily come from how long something lasts. Quality is a combination of utility and design. A great product needs to solve a real problem in a thoughtful, simple way.

So much of what we create does not solve a real problem. And even if it does, it likely wasn’t created all that thoughtfully. How could it be, when the main goal is to just get something out there? This quote from 2010 in Apple’s app review guidelines sums it up nicely:

“We have over 250,000 apps in the App Store. We don’t need any more Fart apps.”

As Dykstra put it:

Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We’re starting to think differently about what it means to ‘own’ something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption…the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.

Couple this ambivalence with growing concerns about environmental and social impact and you’ve got yourself a consumerism revolution in the making.

“The biggest insight we can glean from the death of ownership is about connection,” Dykstra writes. “This is the thing which is now scarce, because when we can easily acquire anything, the question becomes, ‘What do we do with this?’”

We no longer care about acquiring — we care about connecting. With each other, with ourselves, and with our environment.

Creating a product that drives a true connection with a person requires thoughtfulness and a relentless obsession. It requires craftsmanship.

What Do We Do With This?

Speed is not an advantage anymore. In the digital space, the technical playing field has been leveled by open source tools and frameworks. Everyone now has the ability to move quickly. Advances like 3D printing are likely to bring similar change in the manufacturing world as well. Being first is now more irrelevant than ever.

Magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

More importantly, the consumer mindset is shifting. People are becoming more and more selective about what to spend their money on. Apple understood this before almost anyone else, and they’ve led a design revolution that has changed the expectations of every consumer who chooses to buy a product. Thoughtfulness and great design matter.

It’s no longer enough for a product to simply exist. To succeed, future products need that thing, that je ne sais quoi, that magic. And magic takes time. Magic takes craftsmanship.

Craftsmanship is the new advantage.

Companies have to sweat the details. We can’t be afraid to push our timelines to get something right. As designers and developers, we’re doing ourselves, our companies, and our end users a disservice by cutting corners to hit deadlines and striving for minimum viable products.

We have to stop selling ourselves short.

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“The Case for Slow Design” was originally published in Medium on February 23, 2015.