Good designers don’t make good design

Human-centered companies do

UX, product design, service design — they are everywhere in the past couple of years. Really, every company wants good design for their products, websites, apps, services, systems. Still, very few of them actually succeeds in it. And I strongly believe that this doesn’t have much to do with the design talent they are able to hire, but more with the way the company incorporates design in their strategy and daily operations. I have seen companies getting it right, and creating great design output, while others struggling, in spite of having extremely talented and seasoned designers on their team.

And this does not depend on a roll of the dice. Companies creating great design share a couple of common traits and understand a couple of things others just don’t. Here are some.

Design is not about how it works. It’s about how it solves the problem.

How it works has a lot to do with ergonomics, usability and user experience. You can’t sell a digital product with good UX anymore, just like you can’t sell bottled water with being germ-free or a hotel room with having free wifi. People (at least Western people) are already used to water being clean, hotels having wifi, and apps being a joy to use. Deal with it — you won’t get people to use your product by creating great UX, just lose them by not giving it to them.

David Kelley of IDEO once said the future of design is human-centered. Actually, that was 14 years ago. Right now, it’s the present of design. Good products in 2016 are about connecting with people, understanding their problems, and helping them solve them. And if the problem you are solving is actually an important and relevant one, make no mistake, other companies are working on solving it right now, and the one with the best understanding of people and the most empowering solution will be the last man standing. You know what discipline has excelled in this transformation of human problems into solutions? You guessed right, it’s design! (More accurately it was architecture and industrial design, more on that here and here.)

Designers add the human perspective to your strategy, they represent the people you are creating your product for. Or, as one of the world’s oldest Venn-diagrams describes it:

Based on the idea of IDEO’s Tim Brown

It’ pretty easy to get this wrong.

By under-representing design in your strategy you are actually under-representing people as a factor in your strategy. This is probably the most common way strongly engineering-driven companies operate. Basically, this is the “design is an afterthought” approach — develop the feature, and when “the important part” is done, you ask the UX guys to make some GUI for it. The only problem with this approach is that you won’t be able to do real innovation — only by accident.

Design comes from above

This is a story I heard from someone at SAP, I’m not sure that this is the way it happened, but it’s still inspirational (if there’s anyone out there who knows how it really went down, please let me know).

Sometime in the early 2000’s, Hasso Plattner, one of the founders (and still Chairman of the Board) of SAP was on his way to a conference to give a presentation. While he was waiting for his flight to take off, he came across an article about an up-and-coming new product design framework called Design Thinking. Back then, it was not as big a deal as it is today, still, he saw the potential in it (and also, he felt that something was off with SAP, they have lost their connection with their customers), so, as the story goes, during the flight, he dropped his whole conference presentation and spoke about Design Thinking instead, and also decided to transform his company into one of the first large Design Thinking-driven companies in the world. And he didn’t stop just there, he also contributed largely to Design Thinking as a whole, by funding the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (A.K.A. d.school), and later the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam.

I’m quite sure that when you think about good design, the first company that pops into your mind isn’t SAP. After ten years, they are still in the middle of this transformation, with a long way ahead of them, but still, it’s one of the largest software companies in the world, it’s quite a thing to make any kind of transformation happen. By now, SAP has their own design methodology based on the Design Thinking framework, some of the greatest practitioners of Design Thinking, the AppHouse, the Design & Co-Innovation Center, and an actual, everyday practice of Design Thinking methods in their operation.

I’m pretty sure that there were design people within SAP who already felt the problems for years, and I’m quite confident that some of them also knew about Design Thinking, too. But that didn’t start a transformation. A culture of over 70.000 people pretty much qualifies for the definition of “the immovable object” (even a couple of hundreds can qualify for that), and steering a company culture to a human-centered direction can only be done by a high level, long term, strategic commitment — and not by a design team somewhere next to the development trying to change things.

This story is not about one person, one company, and not even about Design Thinking. Quite recently, IBM also kickstarted a design transformation process (that’s an organization of 400.000 people) with a quite similar, Design Thinking based approach, and a strong, top-down strategic vision. After four years, they are in the “promising” phase — and I really want to see what they will end up with in another four years.

Focusing on humans in an engineering-driven company is an extremely hard thing to do. It requires changes in the processes, at first, it will require a lot of extra effort from the whole company, and it requires people to leave their comfort zones — and this will inevitably give space for resistance. This — and in general, making design a part of the operation — can only be driven from above — at least, that’s the only way I have ever seen it work. And by the lack of this commitment is the only way I have ever seen it fail.

Design maturity doesn’t mean more designers

Design transformation doesn’t happen overnight — and even more importantly, it’s just not really possible to get it right instantly. Organizations have something called design maturity — the extent of human-centered thinking being integrated in the company. I’ll use the model proposed by Sabine Junginger in 2009.

Design maturity, based on Sabine Junginger, 2009

It’s pretty straightforward — at first, most companies just “get design done” by someone outside the organization — a freelancer, a design company, or, most commonly, their communication agency. The problem with this is that design can only be an afterthought in this scenario — you will probably not involve a freelancer in the decisions about your product strategy.

As keeping design as a whole outside the company doesn’t work (this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work with designers outside the organization, but more on that later), the next logical step is the “UX team of one” — or maybe a couple of designers, probably in the development or the marketing department. Although it seems like a big step forward (designers are within the organization, no need for NDAs, more flexible projects), this doesn’t really change anything — you might get better UX, better collaboration with the core departments, but don’t expect more.

Actual change comes when design get’s it’s actual place within the company, as an equal to other core departments. Usually this is the point when a Design director (or similar), or a Chief Design Officer position is created. And when design comes out of the UX team, and you see Service designers, Business designers, and other kind of Non-UX designers showing up. The funny thing? This is actually the point when it starts to make sense to outsource some design jobs. Because if design and human-centered thinking are already represented properly, you will be able to handle the distance from the actual implementors.

And at the end, design can become an integrated part of the operation of the organization instead of just another discipline. This, of course is quite utopistic, but based on some predictions, the future of design is just becoming a mindset everyone is familiar with and able to use in different domains and circumstances. As a friend of mine once said: First, nobody talks about design (as nobody cares). Second, EVERYONE talks about design. And finally, nobody talks about design (as it has become just business as usual).

What is important to see here is that the design maturity of the organization has nothing to do with neither the size of the design team, nor the capabilities of them. It’s the way the organization works and thinks — and every company that is not built around design from the beginning has to take the time to grow up to that. But there are ways to catalyze the process — most importantly, by knowing what you want to achieve and putting an effort in it.

Some tips to get it right

As I read this story again, it felt quite pessimistic, so I decided to put some pieces of advice here on making design transformations quicker, more effective, or just less painful.

Knowledge over throughput — When building a design team from scratch, the first thing that has to be built in the organization is knowledge. The actual team that does design projects comes later. That’s because every product, organization, market, design problem is inherently unique and requires a different design strategy- and operation — and finding this requires seasoned design leaders and strategists, and people from the most diverse areas possible. If that’s already done, building an effective design team will be much easier.

— When building a design team from scratch, the first thing that has to be built in the organization is knowledge. The actual team that does design projects comes later. That’s because every product, organization, market, design problem is inherently unique and requires a different design strategy- and operation — and finding this requires seasoned design leaders and strategists, and people from the most diverse areas possible. If that’s already done, building an effective design team will be much easier. Empathy over methods — When it comes to getting a buy-in for design in an organization, one of the greatest obstacles is getting people understand what design is all about. (Yes, even in the most advanced and innovative tech companies, this is an issue.) A common mistake (that I have also made) is focusing on showing how designers work, what they do, what are their methods. It does help a little, but not nearly as much as building empathy towards people in every part of the organization. Getting transparent. Involving people in the research processes. Showing results to everyone — and this doesn’t mean sending long reports to mailing lists, but creating good, relevant presentation methods. Showing everyone the human problems, frustrations, pains, fears of people. Steering them from thinking about users as a set of data to seeing them as living, breathing individuals.

— When it comes to getting a buy-in for design in an organization, one of the greatest obstacles is getting people understand what design is all about. (Yes, even in the most advanced and innovative tech companies, this is an issue.) A common mistake (that I have also made) is focusing on showing how designers work, what they do, what are their methods. It does help a little, but not nearly as much as building empathy towards people in every part of the organization. Getting transparent. Involving people in the research processes. Showing results to everyone — and this doesn’t mean sending long reports to mailing lists, but creating good, relevant presentation methods. Showing everyone the human problems, frustrations, pains, fears of people. Steering them from thinking about users as a set of data to seeing them as living, breathing individuals. Strategy over implementation — There are things that are easy to outsource, and things that are not. Getting UIs, products, or even services designed outside the organization is relatively easy (or at least, feasible). It might even make the results better as it gives you the flexibility of working with different specialists on different projects. Making human-centered thinking a part of the culture, strategy and everyday operation, and keeping it there, is something you can’t really outsource. So if there is only one thing you keep inside, make it design leadership.

These are just from my experience, and just the ones I found the most helpful, but if you have different experiences, please, share them, let’s learn from each other.