For eight months, I have been working in a role that has been less web-centric than I’ve been used to for the last 10 years. I’ve been focused on student recruitment and advertising for an educational institute and I haven’t been keeping up with some of the readings around design and development that I would normally track. My focus is set to return to the web, however, and I’ve begun trying to catch up.
One of the articles I’ve stumbled across is one by Michael Bierut called This is My Process. It really resonated with me, because it describes my own thoughts around my design process almost precisely. More than that, it articulates that key component I’ve struggled with in trying to teach people a process for “good” design. Essentially, no matter how much process you wrap around a design project, no matter how much time you spend showing people the steps to take to ensure a successful project, you simply can’t allow for, nor teach, the magic that occurs at some point in the process that results in the solution. As Bierut puts it:
When I do a design project…[s]omewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!
This has been the case for me on numerous occasions. And, like Bierut, I’ve found myself trying “to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to [a client] without relying on good taste” they may or may not have.
The article goes on to mention a book, Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work, that sounds like something I could use going forward; or more precisely, what some of the people I’ll be working with could use.
Anyway, back to the web…
At the Web Directions conference the closing speaker was Jared Spool he talked sort of about the same thing.
He began his presentation by talking about another conference he’d gone to where there was a contest to re-design the Washington Post’s website.
He described the long testing process they’d gone through to determine the requirements and the papers they’re written on the results, etc.
And then he put up a picture of a designer and said he hated him because this guy had the gall to come up with a design that was a better user experience than theirs. So afterwards he went to talk to the designer and find out the process he’d gone through to create his submission and the guy said, “I just sat down and thought about it.”
One of the conference organizers added, “Yes Jared, that’s how designers work!”
The rest of the presentation at WDN was about how user experience can be studied but they can’t teach that thought process.
He also compared design to chicken sexing but that’s another story.