The cost of bad design
Why is Bad Design much more expensive than the cost of getting a design right before execution or release?
“We don’t have the money for that”
“That’s not going to fit in the budget”
We’ve all heard this, at least once in the span of our career (although once is an understatement). As designers, this is a part of our careers. Constantly fighting for the betterment of a product or design until it reaches something close to perfection. Constantly fighting for the users and having to balance company interests with what is better for the users. It’s a constant conflict and not an easy job to do. However, what is the cost of bad design? When is this cost felt most and by whom? These might be questions worth looking into and understanding in order to see why designers put up a fight for good design.
Good vs Bad Design
First, let’s try to understand what is good design and what is bad design, in a general sense. Going to design school, I remember we were constantly asked to make our designs “cohesive” and sometimes when projects were evaluated, the most common, vague feedbacks were things like “tie it together” and “make the eye go around”. This was how we were told to strive for good design, but really what these instructors were trying to communicate and ask for was for certain rules of good design elements to be used such as to avoid information overload, tread carefully while using negative space/white space, and following color theory, etc.
Although these are important aspects of what makes design good, they are also some of the superficial aspects of good design. However, when it comes to good and bad design and what makes some designs or products more popular and others not, thus resulting in major losses for companies, it is how well it has been understood what exactly the user Needs. User Needs and Content are at the core of good design. These are sometimes the intangible concepts that we cannot see as clearly as they are not as explicitly visible as product visuals or features and have the ability to make or break the popularity of a product.
In simple business terms, if a product is more popular it means more profit, and if not it means less. This is the reason behind the cost of bad design at the very grass-root level.
What is Usability?
In order to understand User Needs, it is important to understand what Usability is and how this factors into any product or design created. A great source to learn more about the fundamentals of Usability is The Interaction Design Foundation. According to The Interaction Design Foundation, “Usability is a measure of how well a specific user in a specific context can use a product/design to achieve a defined goal effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily.”
“Usability is about human behavior. It recognizes that humans are lazy, get emotional, are not interested in putting a lot of effort into, say, getting a credit card, and generally prefer things that are easy to do vs. those that are hard to do.”
— David McQuillen, ex-Swiss banker and founder of Sufferfest cycling workout resources
What is the task at hand and how efficiently is the user able to complete this task using your product? This is what determines the fate of your product and design in the market place at the end of the day. Not how it can do so many more things than other products out there. Not how amazing it looks. Not how “cool” it is. These are all secondary, and as long as they all ultimately lead to supporting the user in completing the tasks that your product is designed to complete, that is what will matter in the end.
How does Bad Design Rack Up Costs?
Say you have not really tested a diverse group of people and are basing your testing on a homogenous group of people or even worse, you assume what users would want, and you end up creating a beautiful product that looks and feels amazing and is completed and ready for release and the company goes ahead and releases this product in a hurry to get it out there. This looks great in the beginning, because those pesky costs involved in Research and Development, Testing, and Iteration probably amounted to almost nothing. It starts looking like a great deal when you see the initial demand; all until people start returning or abandoning these products due to usability issues or because it is not in line with user needs. Now it is not such a great deal when you realize that this product might have been more expensive than you had originally thought, as now the minor costs of development become a loss or a major expense on the part of the company.
There are multiple reasons that a product might fail. Not every product failure can be attributed to bad design. For example, According to The Department of Product, a global educational institution made up of product professionals with decades of experience, dedicated to helping product managers and other technology professionals, Products fail for two main reasons. In the startup context at least, from the research, they have available: lack of product/market fit. In other words, either nobody wanted the thing you built in the way you built it or you failed to find enough people who did, as shown in the graph below in their overall results.
In recent years, with the startup culture become more widely adopted by larger companies, the Fail Fast culture has become more widespread because we know that if this does not work, we can always easily create more and the most important thing is getting something out there rather than nothing for a while. While this might help keep a company afloat, it does nothing to help it grow and leave a lasting impact on users. It is, but another form of “15 Minutes of Fame” and added up, this can take a toll on a company over the long run. Therefore Bad design racks up costs and hefty ones at that.
Steps to Avoid Bad Design
So are there ways we, as designers, can prevent this sort of unnecessary cost in the form of design? Although there is no one set of golden rules, there are some steps that we can use as guidelines and keep referring back to at every step of the project to ensure this does not happen.
1. Listen to Your Audience
Nothing beats hard and fast facts, especially when they are from a wide variety of sources and when the research has been carried out by you, in regard to your specific product or design. Although this is hard, as we as designers often don’t want to do this as it ruins the idea we might have originally had, this is the responsibility of a good designer. A good designer leaves their ego at the door and strives to listen to what people are asking for and tries to bring out a product that can serve the users in the best possible way. However, it is important for a designer to use good judgment to determine what they need to listen to the users and implement, and what to implement as they see the benefit it can have to the user despite the inability of the user to see this ahead of time. Again, all of this is possible with strong research.
2. Better to Invest in Research and Development
As covered throughout this article, it is important for the designer to know the importance of investing in the research and development process and to have a firm understanding of why. This is also important, as often stakeholders (the source of funding), will put up walls against this. From a business perspective, this does not seem evidently a smart thing to do. So it is important, as a designer, to first develop a strong understanding of why this is absolutely necessary, in order to fight for the user and also for the success of the company in the long run.
3. Trends are not User Needs
We live in a society and world where trends spread like wildfire. Once a trend becomes popular, soon it starts cropping up amongst the competition before it is EVERYWHERE. Trends are not bad. In fact, some of the best products we have today and their easy availability is because of certain trends. However, it is very important to keep your main strategy and reason for the development of this product in mind no matter what. Adopting trends in order to support this main strategy might be good while making the strategy based on a trend might not.
4. Content is King
No matter what the visuals look like, the content is the key. What does the product consist of? When a user communicates about this product to another person, what will they first think of to describe it? The core content is what provides value to the user. Everything else, although important to deliver good user experience, are all frills or supportive elements of the actual content. Therefore it is important to pay special attention to make sure this content provides great value in regards to the specific tasks that the product helps users achieve.
5. Engaging the Senses
And lastly, although not the highest priority but still important, are the looks and feels. How comfortable does your product make the user feel? What can you do to enhance their experience while they use your product? How to help reduce the stress of completing the task that the user already feels in the form of visuals and other sensory and auditory experiences? This can be taken care of with great visual and sensory design elements.
We live in times of urgency, where users have massive amounts of products to choose from and the next new thing was considered old yesterday. However, amidst this speed and these expectations, it is important for us to recognize the value of good design vs bad design and the true cost that the latter can have. This is not just a design principle, but also a universal principle that we as responsible people living on this earth must learn to follow. Nothing that comes fast every lasts too long.
