Shaped and shaping: Lessons from architecture and product design
Digital product design can be perilous—but we can gain valuable design wisdom by looking beyond our discipline.
Before digital product design, I was an interior architecture & design student. Fresh out of art school with a hazy goal of venturing beyond the art world, I stumbled into Sheridan Honours BA Interior Design (ID) program and found myself in a tactile new adventure.
From day one we dove into architecture history, hand rendering & computer-aided design (CAD), model-making, human factors and sustainable practices. After an intensive first year, I decided to take a gap year to introspect and explore a breadth of career paths — eventually landing on York-Sheridan Program in Design (YSDN) and digital product design.
Six years later, my heavy portfolio bag of drafting materials has been reduced to a single MacBook Pro. Nonetheless, the lessons from my interior architecture days persist like an old mentor in the back of my mind.
Digital product designers are the architects of our technology-imbued world. Once appropriately titled information architects and now interchangeably known as UX designers, these creative professionals partner with software engineers and other disciplines to create the virtual spaces in which billions of people accomplish tasks on a daily basis.
The fascinating and dangerous thing about digital product design is that it can change human psychology. Our crafted artifacts informed by our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours go on to inform the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of our future selves.
Digital design is one of the few things that can shape us as much as we intend to shape it. Perhaps the most notable example is Facebook’s ‘like’ button: once an employee’s dismissed idea, it went on to popularize a new interaction pattern and rewire the psychosocial behaviour of billions of social media users. Similarly in interior architecture & design, the lighting, way finding and furniture configurations of a space can alter the mood, flow of traffic and subconscious behaviours of its occupants. However (provided it’s a safe and accessible design), any impact is likely short-lived and constrained to that particular space.
Sometimes a well-intended design can fail to match its audience’s lived experience. This usually leads to natural adaptations, such as the many ‘desire lines’ shortcutting paved paths across the world.
Unfortunately, poor design of digital spaces can be harder to circumvent due to system constraints and the relative novelty of human-computer interaction (HCI). This often results in users coping with the painfully unintuitive experience or wrongfully blaming themselves. Furthermore, researchers in HCI, cognitive science and the like continue to deliberate the exact long-term effects of technology design on the human brain. It’s safe to say our minds and bodies are susceptible to the influence of digital design, especially social media. Why don’t we have an accreditation process for digital product design or development, such as in law or interior design? So lies the great ethical challenge for digital product teams today: how might we responsibly maximize benefit for the most parties, while minimizing risk of harm?
I don’t have a complete answer to the above questions. What I do have are a few principles distilled from Sheridan ID that inform my efforts to do good as a product designer.
1. Begin with the end in mind.
This principle is adapted from Habit 2 of Franklin Covey’s beloved 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (a book I highly recommend to all).
Something that stood out to me at Sheridan ID was that every space we designed had a ‘concept’, or overarching theme. This ranged from an abstract idea to a common object that would inspire the design direction of a space. My final house project, titled Spirit of Bamboo, was designed for my parents and featured a floor plan reminiscent of bamboo’s elongated sections and all-sustainable materials. It was a naïve project in many ways, but I had great fun. Still, I sometimes wondered why it was necessary to come up with such abstract starting points for our rather concrete projects. Now I see that the concept served as a ‘north star’ symbolizing our end goal (to serve a particular client’s needs) and helped organize our efforts towards that goal. We were working with the end in mind.
Although thematic concepts are less common in digital product design, it is just as easy to lose sight of our raison d’être behind all the sprints, technologies and methodologies. By investing in robust business philosophy, strategy, research, and post-launch success measurement plans from the start, product teams can rally behind a ‘north star’ that will unify future streams of work. Key considerations such as accessibility & inclusion, usability testing and important issues that address the ethical challenge are most meaningfully discussed at this early stage. Beginning with the end in mind helps prevent us from getting proficient at chopping down trees in the wrong forest (eg. building a beautiful product that is unneeded or worse, harmful). Clearly defining the end to our means also allows us to check if the end is still relevant and worthwhile, and to pivot if necessary in a long-term project.
2. Get to know your users.
One of my favourite subjects at Sheridan ID was human factors & ergonomics. Human factors is the scientific application of psychology, biomechanics, anthropometry and other disciplines to the engineering and design of things used by humans. Its overall goal is to optimize human well-being and system performance by enhancing the quality of human-object interactions.
There are several nested layers of ergonomics in a successful design:
- Have you ever sat at a dining table that was too high or low, walked up or down a steep staircase, or felt lower back pain from an unsupportive resting place? This is the first layer: designing the object to fit the unique physical qualities and abilities of the intended user(s).
- Next is the process layer. In a residential space, most objects will be used in relation to other objects as part of a task flow. Think of the steps you take in getting ready in the morning, cooking, or doing laundry. Thoroughly understanding a client’s task flows enables designers to customize space configurations for relevance, safety and efficiency.
- Finally, the system layer. A space’s sections are orchestrated for an optimal flow of natural light, foot traffic, line of sight and more. Furthermore, this space would ideally be situated in a safe and accessible area, with balanced sunlight and natural shade.
Good ergonomics is often invisible and taken for granted, but much research and precise design goes into objects, spaces and experiences that feel ‘just right’.
Similarly in product design (of any kind), customers are interacting with our offering with certain jobs-to-be-done, in certain states of mind, at certain points in their daily lives. We can gain insight on these experiential contexts by various primary and secondary research methods: literature reviews, market research, user interviews, ethnographic (‘field’) studies, stakeholder workshops and so on. Synthesized data can be visualized in a design artifact. A customer journey map diagrams a target user’s interactions with a particular service or product. An experience map zooms out and records an archetype’s overall experiential journey (eg. pregnancy, buying a house) irrespective of service or product. All this feeds into user experience design questions: what do our users want to do, and how can we anticipate and guide their next steps so that they intuitively accomplish their end goal?
3. Think in systems.
A functional space and digital product alike are a system of systems. A house is architected as a whole comprised of interrelated parts. In a finished architectural design, each interconnected ‘layer’ of the system is represented by a blueprint: floor plans, section & elevation drawings, detail drawings, lighting/electrical/HVAC/plumbing plans and door/window/finish/furniture schedules. Top-layer system designs (eg. room & furniture layouts) are often constrained by one or more lower-layer systems, such as plumbing or placement of support columns. Together, this ‘stacked’ system blueprint enables construction teams to accurately and efficiently bring the vision to life.
Likewise, effective digital product development requires well-documented set of ‘blueprints’. This typically includes the information architecture or site map, high-fidelity mockups and scenario flows in various breakpoints (device sizes), edge cases and error states, animated prototypes, copy decks and visual assets, a design system or component library and countless annotations detailing the interaction, business, and backend logic for each step of the way. Along with close communication, these specifications help to sync up design and software engineering teams as they strive in tandem towards a product or feature launch.
Systems thinking is a holistic approach to problem-solving that views elements as interdependent parts of a whole. When troubleshooting issues that arise, systems thinking helps us to critically examine the system itself on top of external factors. When adding new features, systems thinking assesses impact and ensures that a new component or microinteraction is compatible with the rest of the product and user experience. Without systems thinking, there is no product—just a collection of visual artifacts.
4. Find synergy in diversity.
In the end, it all comes down to the team. Overseeing the product system is an ecosystem of team members who each have unique backgrounds, perspectives and skillsets. It is notoriously easy for designers and developers to have an antagonistic relationship in a given product team. Two contrasting paradigms, languages, timelines, priorities…what could go wrong?
Likewise, so many promising products never arrived or stayed in market due to drawn-out internal conflicts, mismanagement and misalignments. Thus, the key to an excellent digital product launch seems to lie in the mutual understanding and refined collaborative methods of diverse teams, in a psychologically safe environment.
Synergy was my favourite word while studying at Sheridan ID. According to Oxford Languages, synergy is “the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.” I experienced this phenomenon firsthand at Sheridan and later YSDN, where the mutual moral and technical support of peers made both group and solo projects better and more bearable. Throughout school and afterwards, I was blessed by unlike-minded friends who compensated for my shortcomings with their unique abilities and boosted my strengths. In this way, all my personal achievements are in fact collective — each a testament to the power of synergy in my life.
I believe there is immense potential for life-changing innovation at the intersections of arts & design, social sciences, STEM and business. Our investments in bridging and nurturing synergy in our cross-disciplinary teams may just lead to the next breakthrough.
Ending Thoughts
Although this article may contain as much naivety as it does brevity, it’s a time capsule of my thoughts at this point in my career. Hopefully I’ll revisit these thoughts in the future with a more mature, but equally curious perspective.
Although my interior architecture days were cut short, I’m forever grateful for the experiences, work ethic, and friends gained along the way. It was truly an exhilarating year of discovery and growth—one that I’ll cherish for a long time.
Sheridan ID class of 2019: wherever your wings take you, you’ll always be near to my heart. ‘Til we meet again!
Article References
Design Ethics
- Designing for Accessibility & Inclusion (Smashing Magazine)
- Key Issues Overview (Center for Humane Technology)
- Is our constant use of digital technologies affecting our brain health? (Vox)
- How Facebook designed the Like button — And made social media into a popularity contest (Fast Company)
Digital Product Design 101
- Intro to Human-Computer Interaction (Interaction Design Foundation)
- UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet (Nielson Norman Group)
- Usability Testing 101 (Nielson Norman Group)
- The Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture in UX (Adobe)
- Microinteractions in User Experience (Nielson Norman Group)
Design Teams & Innovation
- Design Thinking Builds Strong Teams (Nielson Norman Group)
- 7 keys to create psychological safety at work (Big Think)
- The History of Jobs-to-be-Done and Outcome-Driven Innovation (Medium)
- Systems Thinking (Learning for Sustainability)
Further Reading
- Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
- The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
- Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy by David Travis &Philip Hodgson
- Microinteractions: Designing with Details by Dan Saffer
