Design is a Keystone Function

Hi friends,

This week I was thinking about that big question that I bet all designers ponder from time-to-time: Why does design matter?

Probably one of the first things that comes to mind is this oft-quoted axiom:

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve Jobs

That’s a neat little statement. But how do you explain to an employer or a client why design really is important throughout the whole process of developing any product, and not just a marketing veneer applied at the end?

In thinking about this, the idea of keystone habits resurfaced from another part of my brain.

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg defines these as habits that have a positive cascading effect to other aspects of your life. For example, exercising is a keystone habit that will likely lead to you eating well and going to bed earlier.

In the same vein, I think design is a keystone function for making good products. Having design involved at all stages of development makes it more likely that decisions are being filtered through a user-centric lens. This thinking can cascade out to asking the right questions in research, solving the right problems through engineering, and more.

When you set up a new iPhone, every part of that experience has been considered. How the product is presented to you in the box, how it comes pre-charged, how you hold the phone as you set it up. That experience is a concert of functions from hardware and software engineering to logistics, conducted by the keystone function of design.

Pretty much all companies realize now that design is important in some way. But you can still spot the difference between companies that have it deeply embedded as a cultural value (like Apple) and those that still see design as making things pretty after everything else has been decided. A car dashboard that has beautifully detailed knobs and buttons but an utterly unusable interface is a telltale sign.

Design is fundamentally a human-centric discipline in a way that other aspects of product development are not. Business is profit-centric, engineering is focused on solving technical problems, marketing on communication and promotion. Often, the designer is the only one at the table who is trained to always ask, “but what about the user?”.

So why does design matter? It’s a keystone function that cascades user-centric thinking out to all other functions. It focuses development efforts on the common goal: making something that serves the user and is a joy to use.

See you next week!

Anson