In the department of “things that should happen but won’t,” we have Jakob Nielsen talking about ‘vocabulary inflation’ with respect to design. “UX” is design. “Product” is design. “Design systems” are design. It is all just design.
People choose to label design as something else in order to appease stakeholders in power who incorrectly devalue the outsize economic impact of design as a practice. One of the more minor consequences of design’s structural failure to take a “seat at the table” is that I guess we don’t get to call what we do design anymore. Being disempowered to do our jobs is a bigger issue. Being laid off en masse is a bigger issue. Ending up with stuff like this is a bigger issue.
The answer is not to rebrand ourselves as “product,” and do nothing else to leverage our power. The answer is to understand design’s power, claim it, and learn how to move within business.
This week, for paid members
- Our weekly lesson talks about what you should do for the holidays. You’re doing something, right? We update this every year, but really the techniques are evergreen.
- Our design of the week goes through a tremendously good product detail page. We need to talk about good design from time to time!
- And finally, our monthly office hours are set for Tuesday, October 24 at 1p Central Time. Look forward to chatting with all of you!
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Links
- Don’t use “x time ago” for date labels. Use specific dates.
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- Lovely meditation on a topic that more people need to think about: what is the relationship between value-based design and taste? You can laugh, I guess, but you know this is conceptually correct. What happens when design goes against branding? What happens when design goes against your store’s voice & tone?
- As we all know, mobile-first design is the only correct form of value-based design in 2023. What we don’t talk about enough is how sometimes mobile-first design can negatively impact the desktop experience. This is uncommon but important, and we should be considering it as a potential knock-on effect. Remember that you are developing for a minimum of two platforms when practicing design, and mobile-first design is meant to refocus your team on the primary metrics that really matter.
- This is correct. Please just call design design.