Form, function, and feeling
If you were tasked with designing a dining table, you might start by asking what people want from a good dining table. You may find that people don’t particularly pay too much thought to their dining table. It’s an object that they bought years ago and it doesn’t take up any mindspace in their day-to-day despite it being a piece of furniture they likely interact with every single day. But because they’re being asked a pointed question about this thing that they rarely ever think about, they might rattle off a few random thoughts about how they want it to be sturdy, how it should last a long time, be easy to disassemble and reassemble if needed, and have an extension leaf for when they want to host a larger group of people for dinner.
You’ve got what you need, so you rush off to your sketchpad and start designing concepts for how to make a modular dining table built with strong, long-lasting materials that is easy to assemble and ship. After working through some iterations to make it cost-effective and manufacture at scale, your dining table ships out to furniture stores. You decide to pay one of these furniture stores a visit where you get to see actual customers look at your dining table, and you see a couple eyeing it. You start walking towards the couple, readying up your small talk that would start off as any other unremarkable introductory opener about a piece of furniture before you would eventually reveal your identity as the famed designer of the very dining table the couple had been eyeing for a potential purchase.
They look away from your table after two seconds, moving on immediately to other options. You stop dead in your tracks, confused about why they didn’t consider the purchase more deeply. You decide that this is a good learning opportunity, so you walk up to the couple and casually ask what they think of your dining table. They respond with “Oh, that thing? It’s fine, but I wouldn’t want it in my dining room. It looks like something you would lie down on in the doctor’s office to get checked for colon cancer.” The store clerk laughs as he passes by, oblivious to the fact that he is in the very presence of the very person that made every design decision which led up to the way the table looks the way it does. It’s strong and sturdy, for sure, but visually looks heavy and grounded. It’s modular and easy-to-assemble, but all the nuts and bolts to screw the various legs and pieces in together give off a clinical vibe that makes it look like it belongs in an operation room. The smooth edges and straight lines, all choices made for efficient flat-packing, make the table feel like it’s better suited in a machine shop for someone to weld gears and spokes together on it. Absolutely nothing about the table says “Dine on me.”
Dejected, you walk out of the store, wondering where it all went wrong. You did everything right. You did the user research, you did the design and iterated on it several times, you solved every user need and problem, and ensured that your design worked with every manufacturing constraint. Then why did it fail? Why don’t people like the thing that you made sure they would embrace with open arms. “Form follows function,” you think to yourself. The table was indeed designed for its designated purpose, but you missed a key insight about how people interact with their furniture. At the moment of purchase, the decision to buy a dining table is made not on long-term use and functionality, but instead on visual appeal and aesthetic styling.
The mental framework people use to buy a piece of furniture is “This is going to be very visible in my house. What style and vibe do I want to evoke with it to others who come over for dinner?”. In this moment, none of the details about the functionality and usage matter. They will eventually make it into your decision-making criteria for whether or not to purchase the table, yes, but it’s not the first thing you start with. Humans evaluate objects based on first instinct and gut feel. This is why book covers are so important to get right, despite the saying to not judge it by the cover. It needs to stand out on a bookshelf where five hundred other books are also trying to scream “pick me up,” because no matter how good your story is, you need to appeal to people to first pick it up and read it.
When designing a dining table to solve these user needs, you cannot ignore the core aspects of good design — aesthetic appeal, visual quality, fit & finish — all of which need to come together to create a look that is unique, striking, and makes a statement in a crowded showroom of a hundred other dining tables that customers are perusing to make a purchasing decision for an object that they will use every day and will likely stay with them for decades. They may not even know how important of a decision it is themselves. A well designed dining table will both be appealing enough at first glance to get you to buy it, and functional and long-lasting enough during daily use that it lasts forever while invisibly blending into your users’ lives. A good designer will balance the psychology of how people make decisions about buying a dining table versus their actual needs of what they need it to do when they’re using the dining table.
Form follows function, but both of them are in service of a feeling. If your product isn’t evoking an emotional response in people, it’s a sign that your design needs to be doing more. In order to do this right, you need to filter everything you know about the core user needs through your creative palette of taste, instinct, judgement, intuition, aesthetic sensibilities, and informed opinions. Only then will your design be something that people actually want to use, as opposed to it being something that is simply another tool they use to achieve a goal. A truly well-designed dining table would, within seconds of people looking at it, get them to start daydreaming about imagined futures where they host Thanksgiving dinners or wine nights with their favorite people gathered around the table. It would make your users feel like the table is the staple anchor of their dining room where their families’ day starts with breakfast and ends with dinner. It would, without needing to describe its features or price, make you want to have it in your house within moments of looking at it.
In my current day-to-day role as a Product Designer working at a tech company, it can be surprisingly difficult to put this principle into practice. Even members within the design team will disagree on how much time we should spend refining the visual details of a product, often citing the argument claiming “our users never asked for visual flourish, they just want to see this information that we weren’t showing before.” While this argument is coming from a good place of wanting to focus on making sure the design actually solves user needs as the first priority, the whole point I’m making in this post is that it often isn’t enough. It needs to do more. Form and function aren’t enough, it needs to be in service of a feeling.
One common retort I often hear when I insist on products needing to evoke an emotional response in users is that the products we’re working on are just tools. “They are just things that people use to achieve a task, so it doesn’t need to be delightful, it just needs to be utilitarian,” they’ll often say. To which, my only response is “Every product that has ever existed is a tool.” If it wasn’t solving some core user need, the product wouldn’t even exist in the first place. Product-market fit only exists because there is an audience out there that needs something done, and they’re using your tool to do it. Making it feel delightful and pleasurable to use is one of the core functions of the design discipline, and too often today, we ignore it.
There’s a lot of designers in the industry today who diligently follow the UX bootcamp design process of research, ideation, iteration, and execution without paying a second thought to the basic principles of good design. I’ll often see these in portfolios when I’m interviewing a candidate and there is absolutely no sign of careful thought & consideration given to typography, negative space, visual hierarchy, line weights, and color theory. How do you expect users to interact and understand your product if you’re ignoring all these things and are just slapping on a feature they asked for which moved your business metric?
In my role at DoorDash, we hear a lot from the audience I design for — the Dashers. There’s over 7 million of them that use the product daily to earn an income and pay their bills, either as a part-time side hustle or a full-time source of income. I’m no stranger to people inside the company claiming that the Dasher app is “just a tool” and does not need all the “bells and whistles” that I continually try to persuade our Product & Engineering teams to prioritize and build into the app. We all use tools on a daily basis, and yet, are any of them truly delightful to use? When was the last time you used a hammer or screwdriver that was satisfying? A thermometer that you actually enjoyed using? A printer that you actually like to print on? We are inundated with objects that we use on a daily basis to accomplish some goal, and if none of them are particularly enjoyable to use, then it’s ripe for disruption with good design. Anyone that comes out with a really well-designed hammer, screwdriver, thermometer, or printer will immediately start winning over users. This is exactly what happened with the Nest thermostat, where an object so commonplace that was pretty much ignored and overlooked by its users suddenly became exciting again due to its striking simplicity – it’s something you wanted to put on your wall and control the temperature with while it also saved you money by automatically controlling your energy usage.
For product teams, the value here is in long-term retention and brand appeal. Sure, a person using the Dasher app to make supplementary income on the side may not care about “good design,” but they’re also using other apps to achieve the same goal. They’re driving on Uber or Lyft and also delivering for Instacart or Grubhub. Their phones are crowded marketplaces of digital tools telling them they can earn money on all these various platforms. Imagine the potential if you’re able to win them over with a simple, attractive, and appealing interface when they open the app. Over time, as they decide which platform to earn on, they’ll gravitate towards the one that’s more inviting to them as a user. If the dining table needed to scream “Dine on me,” this app needs to scream “Earn with me.” Of course, this all assumes that we’re able to actually deliver on that promise well enough, but just like with the dining table, the first impression really needs to sell you on the idea of a future where this one product becomes your gateway into extra income every time you’re short on cash. This is where the design differentiation really matters. You can make people choose you every time if you play your cards right and ensure that your design has a feeling.
A common mistake I often see Product Designers in tech make is assuming that their job is to translate user needs directly into interfaces. If a designer hears a user say “I want to see information about my earnings, travel time, pay per mile, time to pickup, and time to dropoff” in a research session, they tend to rush off to Figma and start mocking up variations of a screen that displays all of those things in the UI, making the same mistake as the furniture designer when making the dining table. A good designer would really question what the user meant when they said they wanted to see those things — how are they using that information to make a decision? What decision are they even trying to make? How is that information helpful, and how can I present it in a more simplified way so that their decision becomes easier to make? On top of all this, the best designers will take a strong point of view on how to really drill down to the things people care the most deeply about in the moment of making that decision — not unlike the customers trying to decide which dining table to buy — and really hone in on that moment to get the user to feel an emotional response to the product by leveraging the principles of good design through motion, visual clarity, and delight.
Despite there being thousands of bridges in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge stands out as the most iconic one. Ask a child to draw a bridge and they will trace out the familiar silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge. The timeless look and elegant appeal was no accident. The designers and engineers went through extreme pains to make sure the cross trusses and spans that are often seen connecting the two sides of bridges were completely hidden by rectangular covers that connected the two sides on the main towers. They made sure that there weren’t any hard angles and framed all the corners with offset slats that had art deco motifs, creating the illusion of gentle curves that framed the sky in the large openings within, making for a striking contrast of the red tones of the bridge against the blue or gray San Francisco skies. The end result is a look where the towers of the bridge don’t have any of the familiar criss-crossing trusses from side-to-side but instead look like something that could be mistaken for an art installation. From a distance or from an angle, it looked imposing and elegant, almost as if the form was inevitable and obvious for a suspension bridge of its kind. And yet, it was the first and only bridge in the world to prioritize these aesthetic details because the designers and engineers cared about evoking a feeling. Every bridge in the world is, at the end of the day, a tool to get from one side to the other. But no other bridge in the world evokes an emotional response like the Golden Gate Bridge does, and it’s because it thoughtfully balances form, function, and feeling in a way that no other bridge does.
Even to this day, the economics of massively complex engineering projects like building a bridge make it nearly impossible to prioritize aesthetics and architectural elegance. It makes it even more astonishing, then, that the Golden Gate Bridge got built at all. Nobody asked for or wanted a good-looking bridge, they just wanted a bridge. And yet, many decades later, it stand as a pinnacle of excellent design and attracts millions of tourists each year to its ends. It’s an instantly recognizable landmark in any picture and stands proudly in the bay, differentiating itself from every other bridge in the world purely by design. This is why it’s worth pursuing. Even if your run into short-term constraints with budget, time, and resources during the time you’re building the product, it’s all temporary. Those problems will only exist for the few short years that the bridge is being constructed, but the actual bridge will stand for decades, if not centuries. It’s worth fighting the battles in the short-term to make sure your work evokes an emotional response, and it’s worth refining and fine-tuning your work until you get there. If you’re stuck in a rut where you’re just balancing form and function, I hope this has inspired you to try again, once more with feeling.