The length of design

In my entire design career so far, I’ve always struggled with the timescales of design. I mean the time from when I have the initial inception of an idea in my head to when it makes it out into the world where a user can actually derive value from my work. In a startup, it might be on the scale of weeks. In an agency, it’s never really guaranteed if the client will even build it in the first place. In a large tech org, it might be on the scale of months or even years. In the architecture, interior design, or civil engineering, these things can span into decades depending on the complexity of the project. That seems so unfathomable to my mind that seems to crave and want instant gratification from my own work. I want to see my vision realized, and I often struggle with the timescale of how long it’ll take to make that happen.

My current design manager used to work at Google, and he recently shared an anecdote about how, during his time at Google, he was a part of the initial pitch for the vision to display LGBT pride parade routes and the actual location where pride parades were happening in Google Maps. The value proposition here was to have marginalized groups of people who don’t normally feel “seen” by utilitarian enterprise applications to actually feel like the app sees them for who they are. If a gay teenager in Brazil is able to see that Google, this large behemoth of an organization that’s extremely tech-focused and data-driven can see a part of him and shares his values, that teenager is going to build an affinity towards the platform and the product. This was the argument that my manager made some five or so years ago, and the Maps team only just shipped the feature a few months ago. That’s a timescale of some five to six years from inception to ship.

The reason my manager shared this story is because I had bought up my frustrations with an ongoing design vision project I’m working at Lyft that keeps getting pushed back due to conflicting or competing priorities. I seem to want to just devote a few months and nail down this vision of where we’re going, but the company priorities currently don’t align with it very well. My manager mentioned that during his time at Google, there were several years where there was a mismatch between what he was proposing and what the company’s goals in that given time period were. When the company priorities finally caught up to the value of the proposal, only then did they resource a team to build it out. And it was a huge success. There were tweets from all over the world celebrating the fact that this was a huge win for LGBT recognition in tech. The Google Maps team also scaled the feature to display other current events like wildfires and flood zones, so it also worked out great for the company.

During the span of these several years where Google’s priorities weren’t matched with the design vision, my manager mentioned that he had to keep pushing the design forward with many stakeholders, teammates, and design leaders. If it lost momentum at any time, it was in danger or being abandoned or forgotten in the void of dead proposals. He had to make an active effort to keep the idea and the initiative alive in the minds of everyone who worked there over several years. When the feature finally shipped, he was no longer working at Google. That is the true length of design for a feature that affects millions of people around the world. There are many considerations around accessibility, how it will be abused, geopolitical matters, risk mitigation, and liability all of which needed to be carefully planned and documented during the development process. And the reality is that in an organization as large as Google, these things will naturally take years instead of weeks.

I’ve been switching jobs in design every year and a half or two years for almost a decade now. I work at a place, ship a bunch of stuff, write case studies about it, move on to go somewhere else, repeat the cycle, and keep going. I’m starting to realize that I’m now at a place where if I am to keep growing, I need to be shipping larger, more impactful initiatives. And to do that in a large organization like Lyft, it requires having the patience and persistence to create a powerful vision, continually push it forward within the company, and patiently wait until the company priorities seem aligned with the design goals. It’s almost an art with the way you have to politically maneuver around resourcing constraints, misaligned priorities, and competing projects. I greatly respect the people who have the willpower to go through with things like this, and I’m guessing I’ll have to at some point too.

I’ll have to start navigating my thinking away from working on designs for the sake of shipping short-term features in a product and pivot it instead to thinking of how we could transform the entire identity and perception of a product by overhauling it in a meaningful way that has a high level of impact. My manager’s take on this is that design is in the business of proposing a possible future and pushing for it. Nobody else in the organization is able to conceptualize, visualize, and present as effectively as design, so that uniquely qualifies us to be the torchbearers of this type of change. Given the nature of our current roles as Product Designers, we have to do this in tandem with shipping everyday features so that we ground ourselves in the present problems of users and not stray too far into the future with our forward thinking ideas that may need to change dramatically depending on new context.

The Golden Gate bridge took over twenty years to go from the original sketch of the design to the construction being complete. The chief engineer spent over a decade slowly drumming up support for its necessity and negotiating with various councils and even addressing the U.S. Navy’s concerns. He had to work closely with the construction crews to ensure that it got built exactly as designed, with every design motif and aesthetic element preserved. The results clearly paid off and it’s arguably the most iconic bridge in the world, but this project was on the timescale of over two decades. I have no idea if I’d have the patience to do anything like that.

I’ve written about this in detail before, but the part of the design process that excites me the most is prototyping and motion design. I like creating high-fidelity interactive prototypes that I can put in the hands of users and watch to see if any transition feels strange or out-of-place. I like to observe closely how they’re holding the device and how I could optimize a specific interaction so that it’s ergonomically efficient, easy to access, and intuitive to comprehend. This is the part of design where I’m in the state of “flow” the deepest. I also derive a secondary pleasure by the act of figuring out how to hack a prototyping tool to do what I need it to do, even if it wasn’t designed for that specific purpose or doesn’t natively support that type of interaction. I used to spend countless hours on the Framer and Pixate forums some six years ago answering questions from designers who would ask if a specific type of animation or interaction was possible in the software. I love figuring this stuff out.

So that naturally leads me at a strange crossroads in my design career. Do I hyper-optimize for the interaction design and prototyping aspect, and just go all in there working my way towards a Principal Interaction Designer at some large tech company? Or do I embrace this alternate future where I’m leading design strategy, coming up with a vision, and pushing it forward over a very long timescale? I might be fooling myself by assuming that the timescales aren’t as long with the interaction design route…after all, the on-screen keyboard on the original iPhone took several years of iteration to nail down and fine-tune before people were able to use it. Either way, it’s going to be a big adjustment to shift my framework of thinking from short-term designs to much longer-term projects.