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Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead... I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first. I've spe

Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead... I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first. I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing. At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business. Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally. Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes. Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like. I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised. There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.

paulojreis 11y ago
> I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and beautiful, as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in a true designer perspective. Software people don't like to admit it, but designers are much more prepared and educated to conceive a product for humans than engineers or managers.
- petewailes 11y ago
  I agree completely. That's where the fuzziness comes in. How something works is part of the design. It's also part of the development. It's also part of strategic business decisions (in scoping especially so). I'd put the user story and experience work more in design and product camps than in development. But the architecture for translating that into something that's interacted with is then dev or engineering, which also has overlap into design and finance and other areas. The output of that then leeches into design and business analytics and finance and so on. My contention isn't that design is relegated purely to making stuff pretty, but rather that, just as design is more than that, so is dev and so is business strategy and everything else. It's hard (and indeed counter-productive) to compartmentalise any specific discipline.
- rjknight 11y ago
  There's a whiff of the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy about this though. The OP was suggesting that some designers are focusing on the decorative aspects of design because that's what looks good on a Dribbble profile. Given that 'making pretty designs' is a learnable skill and that at least some companies will hire people based on that skill, you're going to find a non-negligible number of people employed as designers whose primary skill is in making things that look good, rather than things that work well. The other problem is that even if a designer is conceiving the product holistically, if that design is communicated in the form of PNGs or PDFs, it's unlikely that their vision is going to be understood correctly. In a collaborative environment, everyone needs to be part of the design process, because many aspects of good design require an understanding of the thought process that leads to the product as an outcome. The idea of the designer as a visionary who conceives the product and then hands off designs for other people to build is a seductive one, but it very rarely works.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user. In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user. Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business with a web site that sells to customers, this is at least as important as unit tests in code. IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to make the customer experience more positive. The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't been tested properly, and many elements were broken. Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.

paulojreis 11y ago

> I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and beautiful, as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in a true designer perspective. Software people don't like to admit it, but designers are much more prepared and educated to conceive a product for humans than engineers or managers.

petewailes 11y ago
I agree completely. That's where the fuzziness comes in. How something works is part of the design. It's also part of the development. It's also part of strategic business decisions (in scoping especially so). I'd put the user story and experience work more in design and product camps than in development. But the architecture for translating that into something that's interacted with is then dev or engineering, which also has overlap into design and finance and other areas. The output of that then leeches into design and business analytics and finance and so on. My contention isn't that design is relegated purely to making stuff pretty, but rather that, just as design is more than that, so is dev and so is business strategy and everything else. It's hard (and indeed counter-productive) to compartmentalise any specific discipline.
rjknight 11y ago
There's a whiff of the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy about this though. The OP was suggesting that some designers are focusing on the decorative aspects of design because that's what looks good on a Dribbble profile. Given that 'making pretty designs' is a learnable skill and that at least some companies will hire people based on that skill, you're going to find a non-negligible number of people employed as designers whose primary skill is in making things that look good, rather than things that work well. The other problem is that even if a designer is conceiving the product holistically, if that design is communicated in the form of PNGs or PDFs, it's unlikely that their vision is going to be understood correctly. In a collaborative environment, everyone needs to be part of the design process, because many aspects of good design require an understanding of the thought process that leads to the product as an outcome. The idea of the designer as a visionary who conceives the product and then hands off designs for other people to build is a seductive one, but it very rarely works.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user. In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user. Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business with a web site that sells to customers, this is at least as important as unit tests in code. IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to make the customer experience more positive. The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't been tested properly, and many elements were broken. Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.