In 2014, I wrote a piece called  “Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table.” I argued that some high-profile “design-led” flops from promin

Designing in Winter - by Mills @ Substack - Sucks to Suck

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2023-03-24 08:30:06

In 2014, I wrote a piece called “Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table.” I argued that some high-profile “design-led” flops from prominent companies in our industry could jeopardize design’s precarious status as co-equal with product, engineering, and data, a status only recently achieved thanks largely to Apple’s success and Steve Jobs’ popular mantra that design “is not just what it looks like and feels like…[it’s] how it works .”

I worry about the reckoning to come when… ordinary designers will be asked to please gather their things and leave the conference room in which CTOs and VPs of Sales and CEOs who remember how useless all of [this] attention to detail turned out to be will resume making decisions. Design has, after all, passed out of vogue before.

The piece was controversial, in no small part because I was a nobody taking shots at some of the luminaries of our field, sounding like the sort of metrics-oriented / hardcore business-type designers tend to loathe. My peers wanted to fawn over how beautiful the animations in Path were; no one wanted to hear that maybe those beautiful animations didn’t matter to users, or didn’t matter enough to justify their cost or help Path prevail in the market. I felt a bit like a traitor to my field, and have ever since.

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