The Dribbblisation of Design
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The Dribbblisation of Design
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Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#2I think of dribbble designers as who you hire when you know what the thing is going to do and how it's going to be organized. All else equal, I think there's something to be said about a product looking good. Hiring a painter to build your house makes no sense, but hiring a painter to paint your house does make sense.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#3Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead...
I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.
I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.
At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.
Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.
Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.
Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.
I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.
There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#4My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen.
Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misguided thinking that the designer knows my problems better than myself. Take "you should take your umbrella" weather app. The information density is exactly 1 bit per screen which is abysmal. What about my jacket? Or what if I want to play badminton? Just give me the temperatures and wind info dammit.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#5[deleted]
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#6Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management?
Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better designers to the forefront of product development.
But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and, not only that, do it better that everybody else.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#7My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen. Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misg…
This is exactly the point. Your problem isn't the fonts or spacing, but the focus on prettiness to the detriment of usefulness.
There is always a balance between the two. There's room between the pain that is design without consideration of the information and the user, and information accessibility with no consideration for visual aesthetic.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#8Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management? Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is…
In my experience, designers are clueless obstructionists. They take months to mull over trivialities, then finally come up with an obvious solution that anybody could have seen from the start. Maybe I just got some bad designers though.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#9This article compares a community of Visual Designers (the ones you find on Dribbble) with 2 specific UX people.
A better comparison would be Dribbble vs IXDA, community vs community, one with the focus on form vs the other with focus on function.
If you look at it that way, the signal to noise ratio is honestly about the same in each community. A couple gems here and there, but 90% of the stuff I see or read on both don't seem to be solving anything.
Re: The Dribbblisation of Design
#10Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management? Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is…
Proposing fundamental product changes takes solid grasp of what is called "product architecture" in the article, i.e. precise understanding of the concepts involved and the intricacies of their interaction. That means becoming a domain expert, knowing how to work with analytics and maybe even having a basic understanding of backend architecture. Most of the designers I have worked with (admittedly a very small sample) were content with muddled understanding from the point of view of casual user and so mostly drew pretty pictures.