I’ve worked with dozens of web designers on well over a hundred web applications during the last fifteen years, stomach at least they had dozens of names, but really, there were only three of them. Leaving the names aside, allow me to introduce you to them.
The artist
I’m met him in various forms, but he’s epitomised by a guy I’ve never met. I never met him, because he took half of my client’s development budget for a set a beautiful photoshop images of a web application before I got involved. This client was shopping for a dev shop they could trust to do a great job coding with what little remained of their budget after one of the top designers in the country got done designing the whole thing. The designs were lovely, and a good print shop could make an inspiring book from them, but they were hell for a web developer. For example, the landing page had a huge, complex, non-repeating background image designed to fill even the highest-resolution screen. It look over a week to figure out how to get that to load in less than five seconds. There were no interactions designed at all. It was as though he intended people to admire the site, but not to touch it and certainly not to abuse it. There were no error messages, helpful dialogs and certainly no 404 page. He had a vision; he expressed it eloquently; he moved on. I doubt he ever saw the finished web application. He would have been horrified if he had. Not because we hadn’t done a smashing job of making all the stuff he left out match the look and feel of his original work, but just because we dared to “interpret” his vision.
The librarian
Or perhaps I should call him the historian. This designer knows exactly why he does everything he does. He can defend every font and colour choice and tell you the history of the font, the emotional impact studies for the pallet, and cite a dozen successful web applications that used a particular workflow, layout or call to action button. If it doesn’t work; if it doesn’t lead to the conversions you need, it must be the product or marketing that’s to blame, because every element of the design has been proven to work in some other environments and contexts and he’s got the books to prove it.
The ethnographer
He is the rarest of them all, and so far the only ones I’ve met have been female, for some reason, so I’ll switch genders now. I’ve never come across them in my professional life running a software development shop. It’s a little surprising because my shop is different than so many others in that we don’t bid for projects and never promise fixed price. We use an evolutionary approach to development, stressing getting real feedback from actual users early and often. It takes a special kind of client to choose a firm like mine. They have to be trusting and committed to learning and willing to take many small risks. These are all rare qualities in business, but they are essential to how we make software, which has now come to be called the Lean Startup approach. The design corollary to the Lean Startup approach to product development embraces two core practices that are shared with the Lean Startup community, and those are “get out of the building” and “validate assumptions.”
Most of the designers with whom I’ve worked aim to please the client, but the ethnographer designer aims to please the clients’ clients. The problem is, the client is there, and his users, often, aren’t. They have to be tracked down and induced to talk. You can’t require them to attend a daily standup meeting and they’re unlikely to give you clear feedback (“Make the logo bigger”). They don’t even know what they want, and this makes working with them frustrating for most people, but not for the ethnographer designer. She relishes the mucky bits of human contact because she knows that’s where real innovation happens. She doesn’t mind representing her ideas as rough napkin sketches to be poked and prodded by the clumsy fingers of would-be users who don’t “get” her vision. It’s a messy process, with lots of little iterations that may never make it past the napkin stage, but it’s the best way I know to create something wonderful that inspires people by solving problems they didn’t know they had in the most elegant way possible.
That’s not to say that a web application can be ugly, or that we must re-invent the wheel at every step. There’s a place for vision, aesthetics, and historical knowledge of what tends to work well and what doesn’t. But we know that the best way to make great web applications is in small increments with short feedback loops, and in my opinion, the same is true of design.
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