The trap of design Onanism
There is a pattern of practice common in the digital design industry today that needs to be talked about. It’s particularly insidious because by its nature it masquerades as a thing to be celebrated, not expunged. I call it Design Onanism.
Design Onanism is any action that appears to be in service of producing a better product for the user, but is actually done primarily to satisfy the self-interest of the designer.
Onanism, in modern parlance, has come to be synonymous with masturbation, but for our purposes this definition is too reductive. So what is Onanism? Or rather, who was Onan?
In the Old Testament, Onan was the second son of Judah. His older brother, Er, was married to a woman named Tamar. One day, God slew Er for being wicked. Judah told Onan that he had a duty to his brother to make children with Tamar. This was a practice back in that day called Levirate Marriage. Onan agreed, which meant that he would inherit his deceased brother’s possessions. But when Onan had sex with Tamar, he pulled out right before he gave himself over to la petite mort. Why? Because if he impregnated Tamar with a male child it would lessen his own inheritance. God did not like this, and slew Onan too.
Onan’s sin was that he went through the motions of fulfilling his duty to his brother, but his true motive was self-serving. Onan knew what he was doing, and he paid the price with his life. But often we don’t recognize Design Onanism in ourselves and in our teams because we haven’t examined our motives closely enough.
Design is a plan to create a desired outcome. That outcome has to be stated in terms of the intended user of the thing we are designing. If we don’t know who our user is we aren’t doing design. And it’s all over our jargon: user interface (UI), user experience (UX), user stories, user personas, user centered design, etc. In design, the user is holy.
Clayton Christensen’s popular Jobs to Be Done framework is helpful here. In Jobs to Be Done, the user “hires” a product to do a job. So for instance, we might say that a user “hires” Google to find information quickly on the internet. Or a user “hires” Meetup to meet like-minded people where they live.
Successful products understand why their users hire them. And they take that obligation seriously. Design Onanism is simply any action done that masquerades as fulfillment of that obligation, but is actually self-serving instead.
In practice, Design Onanism manifests in different ways. In my work, I’ve found it creeping in when I find myself more worried about making mockups that I think other designers will find novel or beautiful than I am about shipping something valuable for the user.
Or I have a burning desire to redesign or tinker with something because I’m bored with it, and not because anything is measurably wrong with it.
Or I’m going through the motions of user research because its a Thing I Should Do, not because I’m actually listening to my users and synthesizing their noisy feedback into a higher-resolution picture of their cognitive and emotional selves.
Do you see how tricky this is? Bold and novel concepts, beautiful redesigns, user research…these are things to be celebrated! And sometimes they truly can be. But more often? It’s designers playing Design, not serving their users.
We can do better, and we must if we’re going to move digital design out of the stage of immaturity I believe we’re still in. Most digital products are simply not good. It’s hard to notice this sometimes because we’re used to the status quo and don’t dare to dream about how things could and should be. The state of digital products we’ve come to take for granted is somewhere between “usually frustrating and broken” to “seldom frustrating and usually functional”.
We need to hold each other accountable to doing the work of creating value for the user, which is hard and messy and doesn’t always fit in to the picture in our heads about what good design looks like. It’s worth it though, because we’ll be creating deep, foundational work that lives beyond ourselves and our own desires.
What are some ways you’ve seen Design Onanism creep in on you or your team?
