Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It

by Mike Monteiro

It’s human nature to look for faults in other people’s work, which is something we can use to our advantage by having people find those faults before the work goes live. Tire kicking is a gift. If someone kicks the tires on your work and it falls apart, that person is your new best friend because they just saved your ass. They helped you keep bad work out of the world.

I’ve written about getting and giving good feedback in my previous two books, Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client. You should read those.

Nothing you make is ever truly done. In fact, the story of your work starts when it passes from your hands and into the world. Because all the good work that you did to ensure the work is good, and that its impact is beneficial, can only truly be evaluated when it’s finally out in the world.

Success isn’t just launching. That’s the easy part! You could plow a couple of square feet of dirt in your backyard tomorrow and throw seeds at it. There’s your minimal-viable-product garden! But by morning, you’d have happy squirrels and no seeds.

Dark patterns are the low-hanging fruit of design ethics. They’re generally easy to spot. They keep people from doing what they intended to do. They rob users of their intent, because their intent runs counter to how a business makes their money. Your job is to make it easy for people to do what they want. Dark patterns are designed to do just the opposite.

You cannot take someone’s intent away. There are no ethical reasons to design dark patterns, no matter what Brad from Marketing tells you. Brad is a liar.

Ten years ago, before the iPad and iPhone were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about twelve seconds. Now research suggests that there’s been a drop from twelve to eight seconds... shorter than the attention of the average goldfish, which is nine seconds.

Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy.

the reason companies collect the data is that when everything else fails, they can sell that data to someone else.

November 9, 2017, Twitter did a good thing. (Insert stopped clock metaphor.) They increased the character count of their name field from twenty characters to fifty. Their reasoning for this is there are places and cultures where people have much longer names than in the US, where Twitter was born. (Of course it took them over ten years to realize this.) If you’re designing for a global audience, you need to design not for, but with, that global audience. For the record, all the Twitter founders’ names fit within the original twenty character limit. Had there been someone on that team from a culture that tends to go long on names, chances are they would’ve rolled out of the gate with a longer name limit.

Your name is your identity. Identity is a choice.

Pushing a pixel is the absolute least you can accomplish as a designer.

That sentence though? That’s the important thing. To design is to influence people. To design is to build new connections in people’s minds. To design is to build relationships where there previously weren’t any.

There’s a whole chapter coming up about this, and I mentioned it earlier, but I need to include it here as well because a willingness to get fired needs to be your baseline state if you want to persuade people. Unless you walk into a situation willing to get fired for doing good work, you’re holding back. If your priority is to save your own neck, you’re gonna hold back.

If you want to have a say in what’s being designed you need to be in the room where design decisions are being made. By design decisions, I mean things like metrics, strategy, outcomes, definitions, timelines, and resources. All of those things will influence what is being designed a million times more than where pixels ultimately get placed.

Oh, but you don’t get invited to those discussions? For the record, every time a designer tells me this, I follow up with, “Have you ever asked to be in those discussions?” and half the time the answer is no. At which point, I have to take a deep breath. First off, no one is going to invite you to those conversations on their own. Remember, they don’t know what it takes to design something correctly. They think they hired a pixel pusher.

I’ve seen way too many designers present their arguments with incredibly long lead-ins. They’re trying to justify their work, lay the groundwork, show their process, and end with a big reveal. This is exhausting. It takes forever to get to. It bores people. No one cares about your process. No one wants to sit through twenty minutes of background.

There’s a metaphor used in journalism called the inverted pyramid. In short, you give the most important information at the very beginning, increase the details as, or if, the reader continues reading the article, and then finish up with relevant background. If you’ve ever read the headline to a story and decided you already knew everything you wanted to know, now you know why. It’s by design. The inverted pyramid moves the reveal, which you’ve been saving up for the big finish, right to the top.

Persuading people means building alliances. You’re gonna need people in your corner. Which means you’re going to need people skills. It’s okay. People are easy. They basically all want the same thing. They want to be listened to and respected. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s what you want too.

The more allies we gather, the braver we feel. That’s human nature. We’re pack mammals. We feel more secure in groups. That doesn’t make us weak, it makes us human. Find your group.

Because people are not data-driven mammals. People make decisions based on feelings and emotion more than they make decisions based on data.

If I’m hired to fix a system that’s been in place for a few years, I’ve probably got a few years of data to study, and I’d be an idiot to ignore it. (Just like parents would be idiots to ignore decades of data on measles vaccines.) While you’re designing, you’re like a scientist. You study every data point. It’s the smart thing to do.

So, while you should absolutely include the study of data in your approach, recognize that when you get to the point where you’re trying to persuade someone about good work, you need a story. Work like a scientist but present like a snake-charmer.

If you want to persuade someone, you need to take them on a little journey.

They collected the data. Then they used it to tell a story.

According to Forbes, the percentage of companies that fully cover their employees’ health insurance has decreased from thirty-four percent in 2001 to nine percent in 2016.1 That’s just counting the companies on their 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

“We’re hardwired for community.

This is by design. Facebook and companies like Facebook want you to feel like you’re not just at work, they want to be your de facto community. They’ll provide you with everything you need. Not just a job, but also food, clothing, services to wash that clothing, social events, haircuts, gyms, health care, your favorite bands to play at events, and even on-campus mental health services (which raises so many red flags that it’s beyond anything I can joke about).

By political, I’m talking about caring who our work is affecting. I’m talking about caring about who it’s helping and who it’s hurting. I’m talking about who’s making design decisions, and who’s being left out of them. I’m talking about increasing our definition of design beyond aesthetics and into ramifications. I’m talking about what we’re willing to support and what we’re willing to lay the tools down for. I’m talking about taking care of people.

Design for the Real World, Victor Papanek, 1971 The best design book you’ll ever read. Victor saw all of this before anyone else. When it was published in 1971, it was called “radical” and those were the positive reviews. I call it indispensable. Often available used. Every ten years or so, someone prints a fresh batch.