The business of Design

Design (with a capital D) is distinct from lowercase-d design in a fundamental way: design is a business function that deals with creating intuitive and elegant products to fulfill some customer problem or need while innovating on some features around usability and functionality. On the other hand, Design is a practice that envisions better futures for everyone. It defines what is desirable for people and brings it into existence out of sheer will. The fact that this distinction is made by the casing of a single letter, which is ripe for misinterpretation based on whether or not you start a sentence with it, is the root cause of many problems that people with “Designer” in their title face in the professional world today.

Anyone who doesn’t have the word “Designer” in their title would describe the job of a “Product Designer” as something along the lines of ensuring the product is intuitive, easy-to-understand, and usable. These are the only expectations these other functions have of their design partner. The designer, on the other hand, wants to do more. They know the stakes are higher than just a product that works, especially if you operate in a crowded and competitive marketplace. The designer wants it to also be elegant, simple, and delightful — arbitrary attributes that are difficult to measure and explain to non-designers. Designers know that these things will make the product memorable, tasteful, and imbue it with an aura that makes it feel intentionally crafted for a specific person or to solve a specific use case. These are the best designers who are pushing the boundaries of their role as a designer and breaching into the practice of Design. I believe that every designer can and should do this no matter what your level is or what company you’re at, because the more you do it, the more likely you are to have a breakthrough and redefine the world with your ideas.

As it is with the danger of averages, when every product is crafted for “everyone”, it’s also built for no-one. As a company expands its total addressable market, it becomes more risk-averse. The leaders don’t want to take big swings that are likely to alienate massive swaths of their consumer base and risk the revenue line on their balance sheet. But there’s invisible risk built here that doesn’t show up on the income statements: it’s the risk of moving towards a future where customers are entirely apathetic or indifferent to your product because it’s completely lost the plot. Features get added to serve some business purpose of adding a new vertical without any deep insight into whether customers will find it useful or not, and huge portions of the company are formed to maintain and update that thing. It becomes a slow-moving treadmill that can’t keep pace with customers who are running outside of it.

I’m a firm believer in taking risks with Product Design, even if it means the outcome is negative. I’ve always insisted that a negative outcome is better than a neutral one where users are indifferent to your design. If they don’t care about it and you didn’t make any impression, how will you know what to change or modify in your next iteration? But if they hate it, you know exactly what specific things to tweak or update next time. It takes a lot of courage and conviction to proclaim that a new, bold design that feels different and unique is actually the best path forward, and I’ve always tried (with varying degrees of success) to unite my team in that fight. It’s a really scary thing for non-designers to sign up for, because their disciplines aren’t necessarily incentivized to innovate. They are artists of data or code, changing and molding math functions to fit some technical need or making optimization decisions based on what the numbers say. While that may be the thing the business needs in the short-term, it’s not solving for your users in the long-term. Getting people to love your product requires a completely different approach centered around designing with an opinionated point of view that makes a direct connection with users.

When Shigeru Miyamoto designed the Donkey Kong video game to salvage Nintendo’s failing arcade game business, everybody inside Nintendo thought it would fail. They nearly scrapped the idea until they saw a kid enjoying the gameplay and decided to give it a go by actually selling it. It became the best-selling video game of the year and completely revitalized an industry on the brink of death. Miyamoto is the exemplary definition of a Designer, where he saw a future in which video games aren’t just limited in scope to small gimmicky actions you can take in a controlled environment but instead have elements of progression and plot built into the thematic elements of gameplay with actual characters that have motivations, desires, and goals. He then willed that future into existence by creating an experience that everyone internally said would fail because they weren’t thinking about the future in Miyamoto’s mind. They were concerned about the numbers on the next balance sheet, not the one fifty years in the future.

Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, also saw a future in which sound was portable. The cassette recorder was a popular product amongst journalists, and Morita had a vision of Sony’s future. A vision in which Sony had a device that didn’t just record cassette tapes, but instead was a product that played audio tapes and one that you could carry anywhere. Everyone in the company opposed Morita and believed it would fail, chanting a cacophony of reasons from how their speakers in such a small device wouldn’t be able to produce sound that would be good and how there was no demand for this product. Morita calmy reassured them saying that they wouldn’t need to worry about this. He told them Sony would make wired headphones that connect directly to the device, allowing the sound to output directly into the listener’s ear to ensure perfect sound quality. As for the demand piece, Morita pulled a firm “trust me” by telling his entire team to refocus efforts on an advertising campaign that got people comfortable with the idea of walking around with wires hanging off of them. Sony launched the Walkman in 1979 and it was an instant hit, smashing all sales expectations and getting to a place where Sony held over 50% market share in the portable audio category. Morita personified what it meant to see a better future and will it into existence by ensuring that Sony capitalized on the opportunity.

Maybe the most well-known Designer in recent times, Steve Jobs, famously revealed the iPhone in 2007 as the combination of the internet, your phone, and your iPod in your pocket. The killer feature of this product was the multi-touch screen which didn’t require an external physical keyboard and simply allowed you to type directly on the screen in a virtual keyboard that popped up when you needed it and disappeared when you didn’t. This keyboard, if it didn’t work well, could have completely broken the product. It was absolutely vital that the keyboard was elegant, intuitive, functional, delightful, and innovative. An entire team worked tirelessly to make sure that this one thing that could make or break the user experience was seamless to use by making sure that they accounted for accidental taps by capturing your intent with your input and correcting it, that the individual key you’re typing would expand visually with haptic feedback to reassure you while you’re typing as your thumb covered up the letter you’re typing, and that frequent actions like adding periods or spaces were performed automatically without requiring too much effort from your end. What Steve innately understood is that the experience of using this virtual keyboard had to be better than using a physical keyboard in order for it to succeed. You needed to be able to hand your grandmother an iPhone, ask her to type, and have her go “Oh yeah this is easy, I get it.”

Too often today, especially in tech companies, designers are too caught up in the lowercase-d “design” aspect of their job. They obsess over details with design systems, visual hierarchies, components & patterns, or the level of detail in an illustration. These are all things that are important, yes, and the more junior designers should indeed rightfully be focusing on these things. But what pains me the most is to see more senior designers think that they should be limited by their job description and not strive for anything more. They think influencing their Product partners to pursue a specific strategy or pitching a vision to the team and presenting it at a company all-hands is the mark of progress in their career (which it is at a certain level, but not beyond that). The real impact you have is the products you designed that make it out into the world and how you’re redefining user expectations with them.

For a long time, I was trapped in the mental cage of thinking that I need to be someone in power to make these types of design decisions. I used to think, “Well Morita and Jobs were the founders and CEOs of Sony and Apple, and of course it’s easy for them to do things like this,” a statement which I could not have been more wrong about. They still had a board to report to, of course, and they all opposed anything that seems too groundbreaking or too risky. It took a lot of conviction from their end to put the majority of the company’s resources to pursue this vision and nothing else. And this doesn’t even get into the thousands of micro-decisions made by the hardware & software design teams at the company that obsessed over every single detail knowing that what they were working on could either define their careers or send them careening down to rock bottom.

Miyamoto wasn’t even a leader or manager at Nintendo. He was a low-level grunt who demonstrated a passion for game design without any fancy title to show for it (”Game Designer” didn’t even exist as a job or function back then). He simply knew that there was potential in this medium that wasn’t being leveraged and put his risky, bold, and visionary ideas out there in an experience that everyone internally disliked but everyone externally loved. The gap here is that people who aren’t able to peek into Miyamoto’s brain can’t visualize the future he has in mind. They don’t see a future where Nintendo is at the top of the leaderboards when it comes to IPs and franchises that they can spin a dozen great games out of, and it all happened because of Miyamoto. He created The Legend of Zelda and Mario franchises, still Nintendo’s top IPs to this day that have hugely anticipated releases worldwide every time a mainline title is announced. After hearing the original pitch for Pokémon in a meeting where all other members of meeting rejected it, Miyamoto was the only one who wanted to pursue it and partnered with Game Freak to develop the Pokémon Red & Blue games which launched in 1998 to universal acclaim and is the most profitable media franchise in the world today.

This is why I believe that to be a strong designer, you need to constantly be shipping things — ship anything. A logo, an animation, a blog post, a website, a hat, whatever it is, make something and put it out there. This will reveal the gap between what people around you think of it when you show it to them and how it will be perceived externally when you actually put it out there in the world. Most of the time, you’ll miss. This only natural because otherwise we’d be flooded by groundbreaking and innovative products on a daily basis, which clearly isn’t happening. But the rare few times when you do succeed, you get something. You get a glimpse of how some deep-seeded intuition you had developed into an idea and manifested into the thing you put out there into the world. And over time, as you have more of these successes, you get to refine and hone this intuition. You get to work on your sense of how to best incorporate it into the product and keep iterating on it in the forge until you know it’s good enough. And one day, you’ll catch wind of an idea that you absolutely know will succeed with so much conviction that you won’t have the desire to do anything else but pursue it. Pursue it until it is the best that it can be and then put it out into the world. Regardless of the outcome, you’ll know you have shifted the way you operate from a designer to a Designer, and there’s no going back from there.