Corporate Design Made Me Mediocre

Design began as a technological pursuit, and engineering driven process. Then it evolved into a business-driven process that was concentrated on the monetary rewards. Now we exist in a mixed bag, where the creatives, business and engineering all exist in the same space.

Google and Apple have done very well in the past few years, but the two are very different.

Apple takes a savant approach, with a top-down vision on design. Apple is a technological company run by a savant. Google takes a scientific approach of iterative improvement. Both ways are very successful, so it is not one method being right and the other being wrong.

Because the engineering came first and business came second, a lot of the language and processes of design had to move into language which engineers and business-people understand.

We are hindered because we are surrounded by a lot of legacy systems and processes. We use numeric KPIs to determine if we have achieved good design. It is constraining. It cannot simply be about metrics, but we have to deal with it.

This is how the business and enginnering types define success. We as creatives need to communicate our way of evaluating good design in a manner the business and engineering types understand.

When looking at quantitative KPIs, we need to look at how these KPIs relate to personas. KPIs need to be identified and related to users. Most KPI lists still look at success on a page-oriented approach, rather than an entire experience.

Conventions are useful things, but people like Jakob Nielsen just caters to people who like to check off lists. This process is a killer of creativity. Design skills are now currently only used in the implementation stage, but could really be useful higher up the process, in the idea stage and communication stage.