How Design Makes the World

by Scott Berkun

Monopolies, governments and bureaucracies can fall into the habit of not making good things, simply because there’s insufficient skill, pride or competitive pressure to improve.

Beyond design quality itself, organizations often convince themselves that their work is better than it is. They reinforce their unconscious incompetence. Some do this with language, for example, calling themselves “customer centric.” But what does that really mean? There’s no official measure of, or license for, customer centricity. It’s just a label any organization can apply to itself at any time, without changing the quality of anything. And corporations, which are profit centric, are at best a balance between generating profits and satisfying customer needs.

A telling example of that balance is what happens when an organization makes you wait. This could be at a doctor’s office, a store checkout line or when you are put on hold when calling customer support. They know exactly how much it costs to hire another person to reduce waiting times, but they’ve chosen not to spend it. Perhaps they don’t think you’d be willing to pay more for better service, or they just want more profit. Either way, all too often, claiming to be customer centric is a kind of design theater: it’s just for show.

This means we can’t really say that something is well designed unless we identify what it’s going to be used for.

Good designers ask two questions throughout any project to make sure the context is well understood: What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for?

This all means we should resist judging how good or bad an idea is until we clarify the problem to solve and who we are solving it for.

We often fall into the trap of calling something intuitive if it makes sense to us, and call it hard to use if it doesn’t. This assumes that everyone has the same knowledge and culture (ours!).

An honest designer knows they have to invest in time listening to customers, quietly observing them as they do their work, or testing early design prototypes, to understand what the real needs are.

Grid systems are good for retail businesses like hotels and restaurants, since grids have corners, and corners are visible on two different streets at the same time.

As a general rule, the decisions you make first on a project have the most freedom, and the decisions you make last have the least.

The success of people with ideas has always depended not on their creative talents alone but on their ability to persuade.

Designers overestimate the value of their improvements, and underestimate the compounding relearning costs they create for their customers.

One way to think about this is that an organization is a system. A system is a set of things that work together. Thinking in terms of systems is different than thinking in terms of individual parts. If you just think about individual parts, then when one part fails you’re likely to think something was wrong with just that part. But thinking about the system invites further questions: How did the other parts interact with this one to cause this outcome? And how can the system be designed differently so that each part improves, rather than diminishes, the others?

Most people who make things think about the best cases. They assume that their users will be in good moods, on good days, in good lives. That’s rarely the case, but it’s convenient! There’s less design work if it’s just a series of best cases.

But sometimes there are advantages to making people notice something. At the same airport, maintenance worker Jos Van Bedoff realized how expensive it was to clean the men’s rooms. The major reason was embarrassingly simple: bad aim. He’d learned in the Dutch army that placing something small inside the urinals, like a simple red dot, gave men something to aim at. He suggested the idea to manager Aad Kieboom, using a fly as the target. And it worked, reducing spillage by 80 percent, significantly reducing cleaning costs.

Casinos also typically have no clocks and no natural light, suspending your sense of time.

There’s a reason why staples like milk and eggs are in the back, ensuring you’ll travel up at least one aisle, past dozens of more profitable products for sale (it may be easier for the store to maintain, as well). The placement of every row, the nature of every special or sale and the position of each product on every shelf are thoughtful decisions trying to influence your behavior in ways you wouldn’t want if you were aware of them.

The four questions: What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for? How do you ensure you are successful? Who might be hurt by your work, now or in the future?