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Jess McMullin has an interesting post on his blog bplusd where he asks “Why is it that design focuses on surface elements?”. Read his post for all the details but in summary he puts forward 2 hypothesis as possible reasons for this :

For the first one he argues that as surface elements are easier to observe and experience, its likely to associate design with it. I thought of elaborating a little on this hypothesis. We see a lot of print/video ads and most of them are about glossy pictures and hot models showing off some product. There would be terms like “sleek design” thrown in and hopefully we will find some list of “features” etc. But that is the gist of how most products are introduced to customers. Few companies give sufficient weight to ,among other things, usability and simplicity in the initial ads. The immediate motive is to capture user attention with cool videos and pictures to make them look at the product and hopefully think about it.

Even when we browse websites , especially e-commerce websites, its the big product picture on the page that catches your attention and features are somewhere below or worse a link away. I think, we as designers, should pay attention as to how the customer gets educated about design? How do they build the perception of design as Jess describes it? Why is it that when they want to work on their products, revise them, modify them…they think more about “eye candy” and less about the other aspects of a mature design. Of course not all of us can be designers but its really important as a company to decide what kind of a perception of design are we building for our customers. Much has been said about the Ipod but the point I want to highlight is it was after Ipod that people started talking about “simple clean design”. Apple brought that vocabulary to a huge audience and over a period of time people were striving to have that ideology in their product design as well as tout it in their ads.

This kind of leads to the second hypothesis that yes there are lots of work for styling etc… as thats what the customer’s perception has been. Even if we as designers try to convince them otherwise and propose better ways to solve the same problem, without a good understanding of “What is good design” companies won’t be motivated to go beyond the styling.

I think as designers we need to educate our customers while we work with them as they come to us for the simple reason that they believe we know more about design than them. It’s this gentle touch of coaching your client that can make a great difference and help them better understand the idea of good design. Of course we should ourselves be sufficiently “design mature” in the first place but I think its such designers that companies would stick to once they see the benefits over time of well designed products instead of prettied up tools.

What do you think about these issues? Feel free to leave your comments