A little change of pace in today’s blog post. I can really relate, as I’m sure you can, to this cartoon by N.C. Winters for Freelance Switch. It does on occasion happen to me, but it gets more frequent when I’m mulling over a serious problem. How about you dear reader?

Enjoy!

Via: Freelance Switch.

Brace yourselves! I’m going to join the fray with my 2 cents worth simply because I find that many people seem to miss what the Designer Fund is extolling. I would even dare say that even the Designer Fund itself seems to miss something in the communications of their objectives.

But before we go on check out some of the current sentiments on this hot topic, researched and organized for you in chronological order:

1) The Designer Fund in all its glory! A brag list of all the exciting and successful companies that have a designer(s) as one of the founders.

2) Yongfook rants, (in respond to this brag list) in his post “Design is Horseshit!“, on how the premium set on designers is overblown and there is a lot more to running a start up than being a designer. Yongfook seems to lean towards the view that design is about creating value through making things beautiful.

3) Joshua Porter calls out YongFook in his post “Design is not Horsepoop“. Joshua’s take is that design is more than skin deep, it’s a process and a mindset. He quotes Steve Jobs saying, “Design is how it works.”

4) Finally, a bunch of us were having a conversation on Twitter today on the seemingly narrow view of design on this website: “Startups, This is how Design Works“.

You see, it is not about how you define design, but how wide (or narrow) you consider the scope of design to be. This is the same problem many people have with the whole Design Thinking shindig. Take a look at the following graphic and you’ll know what I mean.

Click on the Image for a Bigger View.

It’s one of the situations where people are both wrong and right at the same time. We are all really talking about the same thing. It’s all design. From making things look good or easy to use, to creating the right experience, to identifying opportunities for market grown through user insights etc., we are all talking about the same thing.

Now, lets go back to the Designer Fund’s point of view, and look at what they mean where they say that Designers should be part of a Startup’s founding team. What they are trying to say is no different to what some of us (go Rita-Sue!) have been saying for years, and that is we need to get a Designer in the boardroom.

When you have designers (skilled in the “Design as a Strategic Activity” bit) in the boardroom or coffee shop table (where most Startups find themselves), design becomes central to the business strategy and decision making process at the highest level. So the Design Fund believes that having Designers as founders will lead to a design driven Startup that will have a high change to build something meaningful, useful, and awesome!

But to start building, you will need everything to come together in the right way, and at this stage design switches to design implementation mode. Therefore, in reality you will need both parts of Design (and in between) as outlined in my graphic above. Any argument, for or against the Designer Fund, which only considers one part of this equation is fundamentally wrong.

I was presently surprised to find out that Chip Kidd presented at TED.

Chip is one of my favorite book cover designers. I especially like the cover he did for a book (which I own) on Concept Artwork for the Batman Animated series. So I really enjoyed this talk, and his super quirky sense of humor, at TED called “Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.” It is fascinating to see how his personality merges with his design philosophy.

His opening statement that the first thing he learnt was a book cover needs tell people “what do stories look like?” There is a huge parallel to Industrial Design, where the external “skin” should communicate what the product does. This is unfortunately, something that many forget or something that gets overshadowed by beauty and aesthetics.

He also shares his thoughts on the whole current e-book-publishing-is-dead craze and shares:

Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.” (Chip Kidd)

I agree with him. My feeling is that books will not die out completely, they just need to be better that the 95% of dribble out there. Enjoy!

I was therefore really excited to stumble on this article “The Psychologist’s View of UX Design” by Susan Weinschenk which is the most comprehensive collection, I have seen, of these “truths” of human behaviors. For my and your reference, I’ve taken the liberty to summarize the list here and added a sprinkling of my thoughts.

1. People Don’t Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
Consider simplicity, lead by example i.e. show users how it is done, provide what people only really need, and help users make decisions.

2. People Have Limitations
Remember information overload? This is where it rears its ugly head. Keep information on a need to know basis, clump and/or create visual priority.

3. People Make Mistakes
People will make mistakes, respect that and try not to make them feel stupid. Having an “Undo” is vital and the best error message is none at all. Oh, do make sure the errors, if any, are not fatal please?

4. Human Memory Is Complicated
Human memory is prone to errors and inconsistency. It’s BS to say, “oh they will remember how to use it after using it for the first time”. Susan says “People can only remember about 3-4 items at a time. The ‘7 plus or minus 2’ rule is an urban legend”. From my anecdotal experience, I agree with her.

5. People are Social
People are social animals and will listen to others for guidance even if they don’t know that person. This is probably why many companies that the 5 star rating system seriously. Furthermore, the famous 150 “friends” social limit does apply. Any greater, the bond between people weakens.

6. Attention
People are easily distracted; design for focus or for attention, not both. You will be surprised how often both things happen at the same or at the wrong time.

7. People Crave Information
Susan says it best:

People will often want more information than they can actually process. Having more information makes people feel that they have more choices. Having more choices makes people feel in control. Feeling in control makes people feel they will survive better.

Don’t forget that feedback, such as at acknowledgement chime or a message, is also considered as information.

8. Unconscious Processing
Be careful in creating the wrong associations with your design, particularly important with communication and object design. There is a lot of subtle processing that happen especially through the visual sense, and this impacts greatly on decision-making. That is why, for the longest time, aesthetics was the key driver for the definition of good design.

9. People Create Mental Models
Mental models are the reason why Skeuomorph Design is so important in user experience design. If user research cannot determine a relevant mental model, use Metaphors to help with the ease of understanding and acceptance of a new concept or technology.

10. Visual System
Despite knowing that our visual sense is the strongest sense, this insight surprised me:

Research shows that people use peripheral vision to get the “gist” of what they are looking at. Eye tracking studies are interesting, but just because someone is looking at something straight on doesn’t mean they are paying attention to it.

I do encourage you to check out the full article at UX Mag, it is well worth the read.

I fully relate to the stories he shared, and it seems almost every successful designer I’ve spoken too have made a similar journey. Indeed the journey of becoming a designer is never easy, and I’m glad that Michael was so open and candid especially the part about his struggling to land his first job.

In the interview, Michael also drops some amazing words of wisdom and I’ll share a few here:

Society influences all of us to adopt to the consensus of the tribe. This is a survival instinct which has served us well as a species, but innovation has always come from the fringes of a few rebels. There are two types of people who challenge the accepted behaviors of the tribe, destructive rebels, and constructive rebels. Destructive rebels tend to be cast out from the group, but constructive rebels tend to alter the nature of the tribe itself. If you are going to be a constructive rebel, you have to explain your intentions well so the group can understand and adapt.

A great insight in the building blocks of what makes a successful designers.

“Design is not an academic activity, nor is it an act of democracy. Design is a positive reaction to dissatisfaction.”

How many companies get it so wrong when they design by committee?

Designer is not a title, it is a type of person. It isn’t something I do, or even live, it is who I am, as a definition of self. I have no distinction between work and play, what I do for a client and what I do for the culture of design, it all comes from the same place. Cut me and I bleed in Pantone.

You have to live and breath design, just loving design these days is not enough.

…a bad design is a bad design no matter if it is sketched, modeled, or rendered in CAD. Never confuse a tool for a result, invention for innovation, or a process with a product. The goal is get great design into the hands of people and to love what you are making along the way!

I always say, you need to distinguish between good content and good presentation.

Thanks for sharing Michael, and what a great article for anyone who is interested to see and learn what it takes to be a successful designer. Head on over to Design Juices for the full interview.