Harder than it looks

Nov 17, 2022

Having mentored completely fresh designers and taught undergraduates for a few years, I’m often struck by how easy it is for people to underestimate the difficulty of building good digital products.

“They should change the app this way.”
“It looks way too cluttered and there is no white space.”
“Things have no consistency! It’s so messy. What do they think they‘re doing?”
“This company should allow us to have this functionality. How hard can it be?”
“Why can’t we just follow best practice?”

And building and designing digital products does initially seem easy, when they get started. Just follow this design process—empathise → define → ideate → prototype → test…

… and then user feedback actually starts coming in…

… and hey! They sound like the exact same criticisms.

How hard can it be, indeed? 😇

It’s easy to learn, hard to master.

We’re all mostly blind to our own flaws, as well as flaws in the things we build. For all the semesters I’ve taught—the same students initially criticising apps for being cluttered and inconsistent in their UI are typically the ones making the same mistakes in their own work. Most of the fresh designers I’ve mentored often start out fiercely condemning work done by others, sometimes demanding an impossible perfection with zero trade-offs, until they also get their hands dirty and realise how difficult it is to balance all the demands.

I’m often asked if there are any good design training courses we could send engineers/PMs to, so that they are able to be self-sufficient and independent if they’re not able to hire a full-time designer. To be honest, design’s basic toolbox is pretty easy to learn, so most training courses should suffice, as long as they cover the fundamental thinking models and skills (e.g. research!). I do also think it’s great for more people to learn some digital product design skills. But as with many things like sports or music, design is easy to learn, and hard to master.

This digital product design thing is really hard.

Having designed for a couple of years, I’m fairly confident that most of the stuff I work on aren’t too crappy. However, I’m also fairly confident that almost everything I’ve worked on is also a long way from being good enough.

Design is a craft. Craft work, by their very nature, takes years to master. For digital product design, the craft involves not just understanding the digital landscape, but also understanding complex human systems around the products we’re building—how digital systems influence and are influenced by the human systems. Almost every designer I’ve met have realised (or likely will realise) at some point that to create bigger impact, we need to delve down the rabbit hole of nurturing human systems to support digital systems that support human systems. (Ha!)

Thus, being really good at digital design thus isn’t just about being good with UI or digital design best practices, but it’s also about being very good at influencing people, and making other things happen to support the delivery of great digital design. Digital is hard enough with the large variety of platform-centric and technological considerations we need to account for, but humans… oof! There’s basically this giant unseen iceberg waiting to snare anyone who thinks digital product design is easy and has sailed this way thinking “I could do this easily too!”

Be demanding, be respectful, be kind.

So… Want minimalist UI, but guided enough for folks to understand what’s happening? Pick your poison. Introducing a new simplified workflow, but dealing with a community who’s resistant to learning new ways of working? Great, now you have to work with these partners to help introduce these workflows—is your product team capable of the added resource needed to juggle that partnership? Wanting the most efficient UI patterns, but adding so many engineering hours? Oh wait, your main hypothesis isn’t validated yet, but could your poor UI patterns be fudging up your test results?

Courses and readings etc teach us the broad principles of how to navigate this messy world of digital product design. Personally however, I’ve yet to find a better teacher than years of experience (preferably with a good mentor / coach to help catalyse your learnings). And just as the design craft is hard to master, it’s likely that many crafts are also harder to master than it seems. Engineering is tough, product management is tough, being a good project manager is tough, marketing is tough, management is tough etc etc. What hidden icebergs lay out there? What’s something we’ve underestimated, with our ignorant hubris and pomp?

We need, and should, demand a lot of the work outcomes from ourselves and from others. The people we serve are demanding after all, and we should be demanding when being served so we can generally all strive towards excellence. Demanding excellence also drives the craft forward.

But it’s all way harder than it looks. So, respect the craft and the years makers typically sink into building up their craft. And be kind.¹

o(TヘTo)