Prototyping Is Killing Design
Guest Contribution
We’re not designing anymore?—?we’re just making cool looking stuff and asking our users to get onboard.
I’ve written and erased this article about three times now, because I feel this is a subject that deserves such a staggering amount of clarity and harsh truths, that it might see me getting flamed, and for someone relatively early on in their design career, I stand to lose a lot by pissing people off. Let’s get right into it:
Designers aren’t doing their jobs anymore. We’re all just drawing pictures and doodling on whiteboards.
I know this because that’s what all we care about. When we go to UX/UI meetups and the talks are all about “UX Best Practices from So-and-So.” When we check our Medium feeds and it’s a dozen articles with the title of “Streamline your workflow with in 5 minutes!” When we go to Dribbble and it’s row after row of Nike Ad mockups with variations of Google’s card design.
It’s all about process and tools, because we don’t actually design anymore. Instead, we make stuff with all our sweet methodologies and prototyping apps to create something which we try to market to the user, with the intention of them readily accepting the product/service like it was the one thing missing in their life. That’s not design, and that’s certainly not UX.
Design nowadays is dictated to us by three major companies: Apple, Google, and Microsoft. They tell us what design is and we respond “with Sketch or Photoshop?” We focus on the tools and processes of our trade because that’s the fun part! Who doesn’t feel cool sitting around a white board, trying to brainstorm that magical feature that’ll take the world by storm? Who doesn’t start salivating at the thought of sharing their visually striking Sketch mockups on Dribbble? The problem with this is readily apparent within five minutes of browsing the internet: everyone’s websites, apps, mockups, services…they’re all the same! We find the popular design templates of the month, and lazily slap it on to everything, kick back with a beer, and call it a day. It’s a common theme seen in the startup community, where they prototype first, fail, and then spend the rest of their funding trying to salvage a product that was never actually designed in the first place. We don’t care though, so long as our mockups look good, we feel good, and everything gels with the whims of the Design community, we’ll just keep on drawing those pictures, doodling on the board, and calling ourselves “designers.”
Design is actually a pretty tough thing to do because it’s about solving problems. Design isn’t a mockup, a tool, a process, or style guide. It’s a solution. The basis of any well thought out design-solution is steeped in user research, in order to best understand the underlying problem we want to solve for our target audience. This is the crux of Design: doing the research and using the data we extrapolate to inform our designs. We run kicking and screaming from doing this because it doesn’t give us the emotional feedback that we get from making dope screens or finding “ah-ha!” moments in our brainstorming sessions. It’s tedious work, and it doesn’t translate well visually, when nowadays, your Design skills are judged solely by the aesthetic content in your portfolio.
If we want our products to succeed and our websites to stand out, we need to do the research before building them. This should be common practice to anyone who calls themselves a designer, but sadly, research is left out in favor of our own gratification. We prototype first because it’s fun and because we validate our design skills on stylish mockups with no thought given to substance. We eschew user research because we’re biased towards what we think is best for our users. We fail fast, fail often because we’re obsessed with the process, not the results. We have to drop these bad habits if Design is to move forward. To clarify, there’s nothing wrong with following the work done by Apple, or Google, or other big name companies; they do great work! We cannot follow them blindly though. Popular design can influence our designs, but it should be user research that informs our design.
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