Can design make that much of a difference

Posted by pcresswell on Apr 4, 2009 in India | Comments Off

Design is one of those abstract art kinda deals.  It’s nebulous.  And some people like it that way; avoids removing the mystique surrounding it.  In my previous company, we spent some time reading up on design principles.  The russians actually had a list of principles or guidelines called TRIZ that guaranteed proper design. Just like the Russians to come up with a system to solve something like design.  It made sense too – but mostly for designing primarily mechanical devices.  Websites hadn’t been invented yet.

I studied at the University of Waterloo and took something called Systems Design Engineering.  It was a fantastic program in many ways, primarily because it introduced me to some of the smartest, most creative people I have ever met.  Seriously, these kids were sharp.

So after 5 years in a program called Systems Design, you would think I would know something about what a System is and what Design is.

A System is a collection of things that are organized to accomplish a goal.  That’s easy.  That one was on the test. Design however was not so easy to pin down and basically amounted to, as far as I could see, to the selection, rejection and organization and inter operation of things to accomplish a goal. That is, design was the process to produce a system.  If you got a system out of it, then there was some kind or design.

Now the quality of your system, that’s even tougher to measure.  You can do lots of metric analysis.  Focus groups.  Surveys.  Kano studies.  There’s lot of people that will do the numbers for you.

But in the end, I’m not sure that a guy like Steve Jobs – quite a good designer and motivator of design – would bother with such stuff.  I’m actually not sure how much he cares.  The same was true for my previous company where the CEO/founder simply loved to design.  He loved it and refused to produce ugly machines.  He demanded performance and style and he often got both. As a result, his products were the leaders of their field and enjoyed good margins.  Apple is in the same boat.

Some people like Microsot don’t seem to think that the design matters.  Or if they do, they don’t think you should pay much for it as their latest attack ads would tell you.  Why pay so much for that laptop when you can have a generic for soooo much cheaper.

But the truth is, I don’t want the generic.  Using a product that has had all of five minutes of thought put into the design gives you all of five minutes of pleasure.  It’s boring.  It doesn’t excite.

The stuff I typically enjoy the most is the stuff that people have put some thought into.  The stuff that looks and feels good.

This week and the past few weeks, I’ve been playing with a software package called  Versions.  It’s an SVN client for mac.  Software repositories are about as fun as mud in many ways.  Useful for sure, but not sexy.  But check out this website!

Don’t you just want to download it?  The website is hot.  And this is an SVN client we’re talking about.  So I downloaded it.  The app is just as clean and fun as the website looks.  The design of the app is clean:

Versions - seeing the history of checkins

The layout is uncluttered.  The colour scheme is pleasing to the eye.  The whole thing is balanced and simple.  Although there’s not much use for it after this project is done – unless I continue to use my laptop at work instead of my linux box – i won’t have much use for the app.  But I think i’ll buy it anyway since the trial will run out before the end of my trip and I use it regularly nowadays.  But the main reason I’ll pay the money is because I want to reward good designers so that they continue to make good stuff.  The same goes for my laptop.  The Apple MacBook is a work of beauty.  The keys are soft like butter, the design is clean and almost completely devoid of butons or widgets or stupid keyboard buttons you hardly ever use.  It’s clean, elegant and makes me want to type up my life’s story just to keep typing.  It’s great stuff and using it makes me happy (as stupid as that sounds).  But it does.

Design does matter.  BMWs, Apple Mac Books, and Versions app all charge more money than most people would normally pay because they have great design.  And design does indeed pay.  If you still aren’t convinced, watch this video.