How Objective is Design?

I’ve spent 7 years studying design and 13 years practising it. Had umpteen conversations about it with friends and fellow practitioners. From User Experience Planners to Film Directors, from Automobile Designers to Healthcare Device Creators. And it very often boils down to one argument – how subjective can Design (quite apart from Art) afford to be? Can one make a commercial film and forget the box office? Can an award winning retail website afford a poor conversion ratio? Can a pink SUV that looks oh-so-cool ignore the fact that it’s the lowest selling colour? And, can the lovely looking insulin monitor really take a chance with ‘blending in’ the switch to turn it on?

The core of the problem is in almost everyone having an opinion. Because everyone is creative to an extent, right? Right! And the honest truth is purely subjective design is very, very hard to defend. So the website client, the film financier, essentially anyone footing the bill is entitled to an opinion. Or many! And why not? Unless we get to a place where labels like ‘creative’ and ‘designer’ are not dismissed as generic tags for whimsical individuals who care more about awards than sales charts, this heartache will continue.

In the context of Digital Design, along with asking what the personality of the site needs to be, ask what measure of success will be used. Before you jump into presenting a flashy portfolio, brandish those sales figures your designs have directly been responsible for. Pick the battles that you know will impact user behaviour. Be prepared to lose the rest because really they don’t matter. At each step, first prove the sheer usefulness of what you’ve designed. Then talk about how good it looks. Across the board, there is a need for design professionals to start relying less on ‘cool’ and more on what business benefit is delivered.

I am not advocating purely functional, drab design and I am also not implying that everyone with access to analytics or user research is a designer. I am reminding everyone involved in designing an experience to recall what we learnt about function over form and to use it to increase the objectivity quotient in an essentially subjective argument. What’s functional, measurably user friendly AND looks good is more easily defended. And when the combination is repeatedly used to produce great user experiences that deliver business value, the real designer is born and authority over the layman is established.