What Design Is and Isn’t

Design is the intentional crafting of another person’s experience. "Crafting," or exercising skill in making something, can be applied to everything from concepts as ethereal as "brand" to objects as tangible as signs. Crafting also applies to software products. When people think of software design, they often really mean “fonts and colors.” But if you want to make an impact, you need to craft an entire experience. A Designer's job is to elicit intent from both businesses and users, and to craft the interactive and visual elements that will optimize the likelihood that people's experiences are as close to that intent as possible.

This book focuses on the software and product design of digital products. (Although they’re related, advertising, marketing, and physical product design are outside its domain.) In 2000, Jesse-James Garrett introduced a fundamental model for digital product design in his book The Elements of User Experience. Every designer is familiar with this model. It differentiates between how things look, how they act, and why they exist in the first place. 

According to Garrett’s model, the design process works upwards from the bottom.

• Strategy. This is where it begins – what is the opportunity and how might we take advantage of it? Strategy is sorted out under the leadership of Product Management, but it involves Design to help contribute, develop and test ideas.

• Scope. What must we address to have a product that’s successful in the market? This is not about features, but rather what problems we must address for our customers. 

• Structure. What are the necessary parts of the proposed solution, and how do they relate to one another? Getting this right is key to creating “intuitive” software whose value is self-evident.

• Skeleton. How is the solution instantiated in a navigation model, workflows and screens? Before getting into detail about the appearance of the product, this phase is for sorting out where and how information and functionality shows up. Systems and patterns begin to be developed in this phase.

• Surface. Finally, how does the finished product look? More than just colors and fonts, this also addresses information hierarchy, clear calls to action, and detailed design systems.

Business Leaders unfamiliar with Design often only think about the top two layers of the model – how things look. They don’t expect Designers to address how things act. Why comes up even less often: Who is this for? How and why will they use it? (Sometimes even Designers work too high up in the model, limiting and short-changing their potential contribution.) As a Business Leader, your greatest impact and value occur earlier in the design process, starting with expecting and encouraging Designers to work with you from the bottom up.

I write much more about this, and about how to work with Designers at every level, in the book. Please grab a copy for yourself or a friend, or get in touch.