David Hoang — Writing — design

The obsession over craft

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In conversations about software design (brand, product, content, etc.), the word you constantly hear now is craft.

Recruiters will post they are looking for a designer with a high bar for craft. I empathize with those who feel frustrated about the discourse of a high bar for craft as they often are told it is important with no clear definition of the expectations.

Craft refers to a skill or ability to create something by hand, often involving high precision, artistry, and expertise in using particular tools or materials. Craft emphasizes quality, technique, and a deep understanding of the materials, often with a focus on creating unique or custom items rather than mass-produced goods. In a broader sense, "craft" can also refer to the meticulous process of honing a skill or art form, regardless of whether it's physical (like woodworking, pottery, or metalworking) or intellectual (like writing or product design).

People get annoyed about hearing about craft as they know being a good designer requires other skills to succeed: strong communication skills, a growth mindset, and ability to collaborate. However, I must share the hard truth.

Craft is an unavoidable foundation as a designer.

Not having strong craft foundations as a team member is like a basketball player who understands different plays, communicates well, and is a great teammate, but cannot shoot, pass, or dribble. Let's look at the three areas that craft elevates: culture, artifacts, and trust.

Craft represents culture

Alastair Simpson, VP of Design at Dropbox, recently spoke at Leading Design London about 'Building a culture of craft.' In an interview with Simpson, he reflects:

I believe that design must be a strong cross-functional partner to any and every cross-functional discipline in order to have company and product wide impact. We have to also be product tinkers as well as designers. However, as designers, our number one priority must be our design craft and building products that solve our customers’ problems, and also delight them in moments that matter. We can’t lose sight or focus on the main thing that we are accountable for. The more passion we pour into our craft and creating outcomes we love, the more pride we have in our work. This feeds into the flywheel of culture and enabling a care for craft in everything that our company does.

The saying is, "Culture is defined by the worst behavior you tolerate." I wholeheartedly believe in this statement 100%. This applies to the culture of collaboration, how we respect one another, and to the craft of our work. If junior designers look at the Figma file of a lead designer, and it’s hard to use, that reflects what the team is willing to tolerate. This isn't about using frames/groups or auto layout; it's how what you create is valuable for others. It may sound pedantic until you look at engineering excellence. They would not tolerate inconsistent code or unclear comments.

Leading through the craft is caring about managing the work. Mistakes will happen and the culture of craft is putting the attention and care to fix them.

Well-crafted artifacts represent our work

In Issue 144, I wrote about Creating value with artifacts. Whether we like it or not, design value is contained in well-crafted artifacts. Look at the most important artifacts of our time: The Code of Hammurabi, the Rosetta Stone of Egypt, the Terracotta Army in China, the Liberty Bell during the American Revolution, and the Autobot Matrix of Leadership from Cybertron. These artifacts are well-crafted and designed because of the story they hold to represent the work.

The digital artifacts we create such as keynote presentations, drawings of interfaces, research insights, and brand guidelines should also withstand the test of time. Design work is deep and intangible: hours of interviews with customers, understanding the codebase and technical feasibility, mapping out how the business works, etc. I understand it is frustrating to be great at these design skills and yet be assessed by the visuals of an artifact.

Jenn Spriggs once told our team a story of her lessons in fashion design that conveys this. Presenting the dress you’re working on with all the buttons facing out consistently allows focus on more important conversations. Getting all the details right gets stakeholders focused on the most important discussions. By creating well-crafted artifacts, we then focus on grander conversations.

Craft is trust

Design is about consistency, and consistency builds trust. If you have a high bar for craft, it increases the trust your teammates have for you. Let’s go back to the basketball example. When a teammate passes the ball to you on offense, your ability to consistently make shots increases trust exponentially. Scaling craft across an entire company is no small feat; a huge transformation. Increasing trustworthy craft means you know the teammate next to you will sweat the details as you should.

In software, excellence is often described as high performance, reliability, and addressing bug fixes. Engineering should not solely be responsible for upholding these standards and needs design, product, and other counterparts to uphold the level of quality together. If forms submitted are successful 99/100 times instead of 100/100, this is the beginning of trust erosion from our customers.

Recap

To be clear, a high bar for craft without the work ethic, ability to respectfully collaborate, and ability to articulate your work won’t cut it—those are key requirements to be a good designer. My point is not that other skills don’t matter—they do. However, there is a sequence of importance, and craft is first. This is why it’ll inevitably be the first thing you’re evaluated on. Improve on craft and invest the majority of your time in it. The rest will work itself out and unlock greater conversations.

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

Design Engineering

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In software, engineering and design are infantile in existence compared to other sectors: mechanical, electrical, aerospace, and environmental engineering. Engineering encompasses a broad range of disciplines and involves critical thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and collaboration. Many engineering disciplines have a role called a Design Engineer—a title that has been more popular in software in recent years. Design Engineers tend to work on products and systems that involve adapting and using complex scientific and mathematical techniques. In essence, they work on highly technical challenges that require strong design consideration. Today, we’re seeing Design Engineers become a popular role in software, and this isn’t the first time new roles/practices emerged.

In the early 2000s, the role of a Data Scientist became popular as data became increasingly abundant through the internet, social media, and digital technologies. Though the practice of statistics, analytics, and domain-specific knowledge existed before Data Science, companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon were the pioneers leveraging data analytics to drive decision-making, improving user experiences, and growing the business. At the time, the practice was maturing in adoption and there was a shortage of talent who could do the role. Today it seems rare for any tech company to not have a Data Scientist.

Data Science was transformative in tech in the 2010s. In the age of LLMs, multi-device interfaces, and everything seemingly being programming, Design Engineering will be the transformative practice in the 2020s.

Design Engineering is not simply a rebrand of product design. Whether we like it or not, tech has a tendency to consolidate roles. Interaction Designers, UX Designers, UI Designers, and Visual Designers became Product Designers. Graphic Designers, Illustrators, Communications Designers, and Marketing Designers became Brand Designers.

To say Design Engineering is combining product design and front-end development dilutes the value the practice brings. Like a minestrone, the Arnold Palmer, or Cronut, Design Engineering is a true blend of two conventional roles. Design Engineers have deep knowledge in technological systems while scaling interface quality. They naturally fit in design crits or reviewing code with engineering.

Role, responsibility, and impact

There are three core areas Design Engineering is the top candidate for leading: product architecture, design infrastructure, and 0-1 R&D. These three areas do not encapsulate everything a Design Engineer might do, and the hope is to provide three concrete examples.

Product architecture

It makes sense for a Design Engineer, a role which balances technical systems and end user experiences, to be close to product architecture. In products that are authoring tools (Figma for design, Replit for code, Webflow for websites) it's important to think beyond isolated features but the foundational capabilities of what your product can do. Design Engineers have the right skills to explore aspects such as information architecture of a product and also understand the technical logic of how such things function.

Design infrastructure

Design Engineers are naturals at design infrastructure—the underlying tools and systems to scale design. This might be contributing to component libraries, building internal tools to increase efficiency, or prototyping new patterns and interactions to inform the future of their software.

In many cases, Design Engineers are brought in to prototype experiences that otherwise would be nearly impossible in static mockups in Figma. When you’re dealing with an interaction with a Language Server Protocol (LSP) or a layout engine for a site builder, you have to build the prototype in code.

0-1 R&D

Exploring new product directions can be needed for an early-stage company needing to pivot in direction or an established company looking for new growth opportunities. These initiatives are usually not funded due to the perceived risk of pulling people off teams to do this unproven work. Due to the multidisciplinary skill sets of Design Engineers, they're able to explore this space much more quickly and effectively than other teams.

Org structure

My philosophy on org design is to optimize for the desired results, not the existing org chart. I’ve been at places where Design Engineers reported to me (Design) and others where they report to Engineering. For the sake of Design Engineers, it's important to have a clear reporting line. Creative Technologists (made popular at Airbnb and Uber) in the 2010s have never recovered from the trauma of having unclear expectations and conflicting priorities of multiple orgs.

Design Engineering will revolutionize the 2020s

As we navigate what seems to be a tech paradigm shift with LLMs, AI applications, and multi-device experiences, Design Engineers will be this decade’s Data Scientist. Expect talent to be rare and continued definition of the impact of the role.

My hope is not for designers to simply change their title to Design Engineer on LinkedIn. It’s uncertain if every company needs a Design Engineer. However, I am confident companies with authoring environments or complex interactions/data need Design Engineers. Snap, Retool, Replit, Uber, Square, OpenAI, and The Browser Company are a few examples of companies that have Design Engineers on their software teams.

Data was the currency in the web era of social and ad tech. Now it’s trained data (LLMs) presented in multi-device interfaces. When it comes to an emerging function in a paradigm shift in tech, the Design Engineer is the new Data Scientist. Let’s see if that’s true in ten years.

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

Building your designs

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

At some point in a designer’s career, the age-old question is asked: "Should designers code?" My direct answer for people who design software interfaces is yes. This is a belief I've held my entire career. Despite my stance, I don't like the question. It might be the wrong question to focus on and varies depending on who is asking it. Designers feel like they are doing multiple jobs, so if someone outside our practice provokes the question, it feels like we're being asked to do more without being rewarded for the work.

At its core, design is taking an idea and making it tangible. Building your designs is a continuation and extension of that tangibility. Ignore the question of whether designers should code and think of it this way:

Designers build.

The fidelities of building Building your designs doesn’t assume production code. Less than 5% of the code I've written in my career made it to production (that’s a good thing), but 100% of it was considered in the software development process.

One of my favorite use cases to build my designs is to quickly navigate through the interface flow. When I used to work on iOS apps, my favorite method of building iOS prototypes was a simple Xcode project using UIStoryboard. Storyboards (as the name implies) made it easy to add interface elements in views and connect the views to have a first look at the experience. I’d compile the project and put it on a test iPhone, hand it to the developers for us to walk through the experience. Low-fidelity builds invoke high-fidelity questions. Even in the first run we could have a clear discussion on trade-offs and upcoming design challenges. I’d take the feedback and update the Product Requirements Doc (yes, designers should write PRDs).

Here is a video demo of the prototype I built. It’s all built in storyboards with a bit of Swift code to detect the logic. It did not take very long to build either! This is an example of how, with a little bit of technical acumen, you can put something very functional together. There are some designers out there who are truly unicorns in the craft—able to design and write code, even at the production level. They’re often called Design Engineers today, and I think they will be the most sought after role this decade.

Building storyboards and UI flows can lead to prototypes, proof of concept, and the insights needed in software implementation.

Comprehension of materials

When bringing a building or structure to life, interior designers work closely with architects—a similar relationship between software designers and engineers. Interior designers do not focus on architecture, but the good ones have intimate knowledge of the considerations and methods of architecture to ensure the design vision can come to life. They may not be the ones building the blueprints, but interior designers understand the engineering design decisions that influence their design.

When a sculptor creates a bronze statue, comprehension of the materials is not only the temperature the alloy needs to be heated to pour into the mold. What is the patina effect over time that might change the look of the sculpture? What is the weight and durability of the output? How will people maintain the piece years down the road? Though software is a different process than creating a physical object, there are similar considerations in the interface implementation and maintainability of the codebase.

Understanding the build materials fosters accessible design. If you care about accessibility, building your designs will make you even more considerate of it. It'll force you to think about the different states and properties of an interface. Running a built interface through a screen reader builds more empathy than a representation of an interface.

Understanding the production line

Building and shipping software is like other product development processes. There is a production cycle that usually can be improved. One added benefit of building your designs is understanding how software is made. There is a slew of steps before you should ship: implementation, quality assurance, systems testing, and more.

Going through this process yourself gives you a clear picture of what happens to the design through implementation. You’ll better understand bottlenecks and have a stronger sense of what considerations will need to be made as your design gets pushed through.

Getting acclimated to building

If you’ve never built software with code, getting started can feel intimidating. Fortunately, the code barrier is lowering every day, making it more approachable and accessible to do so. Building is not a process, it's an action of transformation, and it matters less how you build it.

When learning a new skill, I recommend finding the laziest way possible to build confidence. I used to take screenshots and reproduce them in Photoshop to build up my interface design skills. Here are some ideas to accelerate your comfort with the material of software:

Build your designs in Webflow—no-code to know code. You'll learn front-end primitives as you use it. As you get more comfortable, export the code to Replit and use AI to expand on what you've created
Use Figma's Dev Mode and build it yourself
Practice reconstructing your interface designs in code

As you get more comfortable, you’ll be able to write more code from scratch. Remember, these skills take years to develop so focus on daily progress and small wins.

Building empowers

It’s heartbreaking to see a designer spend all this time working on screens and it never coming to life. Build your designs because you will make your idea tangible—don’t do it for others. It’s not, “designers should do this.” It’s, “I will do this.”

Someone once said to me, "When you build your designs, it expands your influence in decision-making. Why would you opt out of that as a designer?" I think about this a lot. Great software designers think of design from idea to software. We proclaim this a lot yet don't practice it.

Building your designs makes you a better designer.

Designers build.

Originally posted on Proof of Concept

IDDE: The infusion of design and dev tools

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Many millennial designers grew up playing with Microsoft Paint—often the first UI drawing tool they used whether they knew it or not. This was also true for me, but there was another software that inspired me as a kid—Visual Basic 1.0. I thought the visual development environment for BASIC created by Alan Cooper was a design tool. From Visual Basic, to HyperCard, and to Macromedia Dreamweaver, I never cared (or knew) the difference between a design tool and development tool. It was about making something.

2008 to 2015 were formative years as a designer. I immersed myself in as many tools as possible and found ways to subvert them to build something; some of my favorites being Quartz Composer, Xcode, Framer.js, and coding on TextMate 2. Blending design tools with ways to build, I became enamored with the concept of an Integrated Design (and) Development Environment (IDDE).

The traditional IDE is a suite of tools and features needed for you to build and ship software. I never understood why design wasn't a part of it. Funny story: when I interviewed with Apple's Xcode team many years ago, one of the interviewers asked me what wild idea I would propose. "I would buy Sketch 2.0 and make it the new Interface Builder." This probably killed the interview for me.

Today, this vision of design tools and developer tools coming together is becoming more real than ever—not because of my experiences with Visual Basic as an eight-year-old, but because the way software is made is rapidly changing.

There are forces of nature in play accelerating this change, and it’s more timely than ever. The first is the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs)—no surprise if you've been following tech trends in the past 12–18 months. I don't think LLMs are a fad or hype cycle but a foundational change. Because of the complexity of these systems, drawing UI isn't sufficient to design for something so dynamic. LLMs are only one example of a dynamic system being a core aspect of software. With innovations like Open Interpreter’s 01, multiple-device interaction is another complex system that drawing software cannot comprehend.

Second, the skill range of designers and engineers is expanding through natural skill building or augmentation with AI workflows. A designer who may not be comfortable with coding can hack something together through natural language. It also means a software engineer who may not like front-end work can get help with AI tools to close the skill gap. Both disciplines are getting more and more comfortable outside their traditional workflows. According to Figma, 30% of their users are developers.

Finally, shipping software is getting more seamless, resulting in faster iteration cycles to production. In my early career the most magical dev-ex experience was building apps with Ruby on Rails and deploying to Heroku. Today’s experiences will continue to get better for dev ex (and design ex!) for software creators.

Infusing design and development workflows

The concept of merging design and developer tools sounds great, but infusing the workflows can’t be slapped on. Regardless of how innovative or cool your product is, existing human behaviors and adoption will be the biggest competitor to your product’s success. Remember, the two most opinionated people about workflows on the planet are designers and developers. If the workflows are well considered and evolved, adoption can occur.

I came up with a few thoughts on what matters in an infused workflow and this is not a comprehensive list:

Abstractions are good, but software creators need to access the raw material (I need to be able to pop the hood open to look at the engine)
Access to inputs for real-time feedback is important for any interface manipulation
People break each other's design and code all the time and this often results in manual reconciliation
Presence and communication—the ability to have visibility on how changes impact the work

The IDDE is a software creation platform

It's an exciting time for everyone to participate in software creation. The infusion of design and dev tools is not replacing people, but empowering so many others with software developers being more important than ever.

The IDDE has been something I've been thinking about for more than ten years in my career. I can't think of a greater purpose than building tools that revolutionize the internet. I was motivated by this mission at Webflow and now get to work on it at Replit.

As Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” If we can get more people to create software in the world, perhaps one of those people's ideas is the next idea that changes the world.

Design's Seat at the (Cap) Table: Part II

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In part one, we discussed the value of designers getting involved in angel investing. Let’s talk about the other side of the cap table—why it’s important for an investment round to have a designer be a part of it.

“Let me know how I can be helpful” is a running joke of dudes (it’s always a dude) in Patagonia vests, particularly in Silicon Valley. I truly believe when these words are backed with authentic action, it is so impactful and powerful for founders. Many pre-seed companies need capital to keep their idea alive. There are many reasons to have a designer on your cap table; some more obvious than others.

Design help in the product and brand

Let’s start with the obvious one...design. Unless one of the founders is a designer, there’s a chance that early-stage startups haven’t hired a designer yet. This might sound blasphemous, but the reality is a lot of funding in early startups will go to engineering to build the product. The amount of value a designer can provide to an early-stage startup is immense. Form Capital is a great example of this. They offer actual design work with their portfolio companies in the form of design sprints and working closely with founders.

Experience and system design

Experience is key and less visible than working on the startup’s product itself. When you make a decision on something, you’re designing an outcome. Early on, many companies are not prioritizing systems due to the need to move fast. Designers, some of the best systems thinkers, can offer consideration and a point of view that allows you to move fast without facing unintended consequences later on.

The area I’ve observed this to be very helpful is thinking about recruiting and hiring, DEI initiatives, and accessibility. These are not things that should be bolted on after you scale but considered from the very beginning. Designers also think a lot about macro-level interaction design, such as journey mapping and user experiences. Recruiting, hiring, and onboarding are some of the most crucial moments as your startup grows, and having a designer think about some of these opportunities adds tremendous value.

Many designers also have experience doing customer research, at least enough to be dangerous. This can help amplify product validation of what to work on next while moving quickly. In a world where research is often first on the chopping block, it’s unlikely a founding team has a researcher, and design can bridge that gap for quite some time.

Helping with hiring your first designer

There is no harder role to fill in design than the founding designer at a startup. An angel investor who is a designer can fill gaps in your startup. Even with a founder as a designer, they can benefit from an experienced advisor to help them navigate. An advisor has a great network of designers that your company can tap into.

These are a few examples of how a designer can help on your cap table. There’s this quote from the sci-fi cartoon Futurama, “When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.” In many ways, I believe this is the value design angel investors bring.

Notes

If you want to learn more, Mike Kruzeniski has a great resource called Design Angels with really comprehensive information.
I highly recommend the book “Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups” by David S. Rose as a great primer to angel investing
Thanks to Hareem Mannan for brainstorming this article with me
A huge thanks to those who encouraged me to get into angel investing (you know who you are)

Read Part I: The value add design angel investors bring

Design's Seat at the (Cap) Table: Part I

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Until recently, angel investment felt out of reach due to my perception of what it took to get started—a lot of capital and deal flow. The vivid dream turned into a reality when Paige Finn Doherty inspired me to make it real by investing in a syndicate she led. The experience was so inclusive it was a rude awakening for me on what’s really needed to get started.

Alumni designers who found success early at Silicon Valley startups formed entities like Designer Fund, Combine VC, and Form Capital. They’ve set the vision on what role design can play in venture capital. Despite that, there's still a large opportunity for designers to focus on individual angel investors.

Design continues to struggle to find that proverbial seat at the table on the executive level. We hear about the importance of design, yet we don’t see much representation at the most crucial level. Designers may not have a seat at the table at companies until there are more seats occupied on the cap table of design angel investors to advocate for it from the other side. A design angel investor has a proven track record of what happens when Design is (or isn’t) represented in leadership and strategy.

I’ve dipped my toes in many different roles, and I am a designer at heart. I love solving problems to create elegant software experiences for humans. In the investment world, you might call me an operator, which is a cool word for someone who works at a company. I work at Webflow as an operator leading Design, a practice I’ve done for almost as long as some of the founders I work with have been alive. I also have experience in scaling startups and have been a part of product leadership teams, which brought me closer to how a company operates.

I’m still a neophyte when it comes to angel investing, and there are so many more qualified people who can tell you about angel investing than I can. What I can offer is a fresh perspective of a designer who wanted to invest in founders and startups. I’ll tell you what I tell all founders I invest in: you can get more money from other angel investors, but I can give you other forms of value if I’m on your cap table. I’m deliberately letting people carry me to be involved and gain experience. You won’t see me cutting big checks or leading rounds yet for two simple reasons:

I’m not ready to write big checks based on how much I’m willing to allocate to angel investing
My primary commitment is as an operator, and leading a round is time-consuming

This is what makes micro-investing so appealing. I get to take high risk while keeping it low-key. Let’s not pretend that you don’t need money to invest. What people might not realize is the size of the check, which ranges from $1,000 to $100,000 (or more). I have absolutely no shame in the size of the check I write at this moment.

Though value is typically attributed to the size of the check you commit to, you can add value in so many other ways. Let’s go through a hypothetical situation. If you invest $1,000 in a round as a value add investor when others might be putting in $100,000, then chances are you might feel 100x inferior—I know I did. Investment starts with the check and doesn’t end with it.

An angel investor once told me that the value you can deliver as a value add investor can truly change the trajectory of a startup’s success. As an experienced operator, a quick call or email to advise a group of founders can save them time and money they would otherwise spend figuring things out on their own. So you might cut a $100,000 check, but you might also provide guidance for a startup to save them hundreds of thousands of dollars. This perspective completely changed how I viewed my tiny investment. A $100,000 check helps only when it converts to value.

The opportunity for designers in venture

Why would designers want to become angel investors? Isn’t that what product managers and engineers with successful exits do? That’s the problem within itself...why not us?

Guiding design decisions

By the time a designer joins a company, there is already so much legacy debt. Working with early startups gives us the opportunity to be proactive about problem-solving and having a design advisor can help flag dependencies early on.

Product strategy

Designers talk a lot about how they’d like to have more product influence in the companies they work at. This has resulted in some product designers pivoting into product management. There are other ways aside from a career change to have product influence, and startup advising is a great way to flex your product strategy muscle.

Angel investing is mentorship

Design leader coach Mia Blume (formerly IDEO, Pinterest, and Square) often speaks about how we need sponsorship in design leadership. One way to sponsor is to allocate funds to it. By committing to a check, even at a smaller size, it’s representative of your belief in the founders and their ambitions. If you don’t have the privilege of allocating funds to investments, see how you can get involved, such as being an advisor to a startup.

Being an accredited investor before meant you possessed a certain level of capital, but the Series 65, Series 7, or Series 82 exams are new pathways for accreditation. There’s no better time to get started.

I treat my angel investing the exact same way as I might back a Kickstarter project or invest in publicly traded companies on Robinhood; a way to build a portfolio of bets for things and people I believe in.

Don’t let the size of the check discourage you about the value you bring. It’s more than you probably give yourself credit for. The cap table may be the ultimate seat at the table design needs to enable more representation in companies. Stay tuned for part two of this post to discuss in greater detail the value of having a design angel on your cap table as an investor and startup founder.

Notes

I highly recommend the book "Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups" by David S. Rose as a great primer to angel investing
Thanks to Hareem Mannan for brainstorming this article with me
A huge thanks to those who encouraged me to get into angel investing (you know who you are)

Read Part II: The value add design angel investors bring

The role of taste (and what it means)

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Happy Sunday from Brooklyn, NY. This week, many new memories made were in familiar places in my former neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights. I lived in the neighborhood near the promenade overlooking the iconic bridge named after the borough and skyline of Manhattan for four years—a place that still feels like home every time I visit.

In addition to being home to the best Sardinian restaurant in New York, Brooklyn Heights is where Adam Yauch Park is named after the legendary member of the Beastie Boys, MCA. Formerly, Squibb Park, the park was renamed to dedicate Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012 (RIP MCA). Brooklyn Heights is where Yauch grew up, and his mom Frances still lived there at the time I was there. This isn’t an important prelude, but a segue to talk about a man who had a close relationship with the Beastie Boys and many other iconic musicians: Rick Rubin. This week, we’ll talk about Rubin as a proxy for the role of taste in design.

A few weeks ago, 60 Minutes posted their 60 Minutes interview, a sit-down with Anderson Cooper and Rick Rubin, a record producer, and co-founder of Def Jam Records. This interview is part of the launch of Rubin’s new book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. The tweet from the 60 Minutes account sparked many thoughts about Rubin, such as, “What does he actually do then?”

<aside class="x-post-card" aria-label="Post from 60 Minutes on X"> <blockquote class="x-post-card__quote" cite="https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1614785392456105985"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr">“I have no technical ability. And I know nothing about music.”<br><br>Music producer Rick Rubin says he can barely play any instruments, but says artists come to him because of “the confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express what I feel.” <a class="sr-only" href="https://t.co/zLrPYRUjvs">https://t.co/zLrPYRUjvs</a> <a class="sr-only" href="https://t.co/KRZWLCpSB2">pic.twitter.com/KRZWLCpSB2</a></p> </blockquote> <footer class="x-post-card__meta"> <cite class="x-post-card__author"><span aria-hidden="true">— </span>60 Minutes (@60Minutes)</cite> <a class="x-post-card__date" href="https://x.com/60Minutes/status/1614785392456105985" rel="noopener noreferrer"><time datetime="2023-01-16">January 16, 2023</time></a> </footer> </aside>

Wait, what on Earth does Rubin actually do then? Is he one of those “I have an app idea” guys (it’s always a guy) who needs the talents of product developers who can actually build the app? Surely someone who hasn’t been a designer cannot have design taste because they haven’t spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to the Rhode Island School of Design, right? The answer is, Rubin is kind of like all these things, but he’s damn good at his job, which is having great taste, spotting talent, and popularizing it. Rubin represented artists such as the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, and the litany of legends go on.

Let’s talk about taste and the role it plays in creativity and software. “Taste” undefined is vague like those words that generalize without substance, like “cultural fit.” In essence, taste is curating subjectivity in a way that brings objectivity to your vision. It’s the ability to say, “this is dope, and I’ll tell you in a detailed manner why it is.” Taste is being able to articulate why you enjoy the Riot in Belgium’s remix of Chromeo’s Bonafied Lovin’ more than the original.

Everyone has taste, but not all of it is good. In fact, much of it is bad. For example, I could tell you I love Nickelback and listen to it every waking minute of my life (to be clear, I don’t) but that doesn’t mean my taste is good in comparison to the taste of others. Taste also doesn't equate to things you like. I love watching The Expendables or Jean-Claude Van Damme films but would absolutely not equate that to my film curation of great taste.

Taste without credibility doesn’t go far

There was a reason artists like LL Cool J were sending demo tapes to Rick Rubin’s dorm room at NYU to get it in front of him. His taste was respected and trend-setting. There are two ways to get respect for your taste. The first is Rubin's way, where you have such a grasp on what you like that it influences how other people like it. The second is having such a pedigree in the work you've done in your craft that people respect your taste. As a designer and builder, the second one is your greatest power.

Articulating taste

One of my favorite series is Detail by the late, great Kobe Bryant on ESPN. In this series, Bryant breaks down the specific attributes of what makes certain players great—a great comparison of how great taste can be articulated. Saying something is modern or on brand without any articulation of why is not taste. It's saying a very obvious thing with no substance.

Give users choice: Design ecosystems, not paths

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Originally posted on Webflow Blog

User-centered design doesn't actually center the user anymore.

Underneath a benign name, "user-centered" design journeys are just rigid, biased environments where the user doesn't have the freedom of choice. They only have freedom to move along the arbitrary pathways that the designer gives them.

There's a term for what happens when users rebel against these constraints. In urban planning — it's called the "desire path." For example, an urban planner may lay out a nice brick path for pedestrians, but pedestrians don't stay within the path's boundaries. Instead, they depart from the plan and tread through grass, making their own shortcuts that cut corners.

Designers have historically been afraid of this type of unpredictability, but there's a way to design with it in mind.

Enter, ecosystem design. A truly user-centered design journey that allows for a matrix of possible interactions and empowers users to create their own pathways and build for their own communities using their own tools.

User-centered design is not enough — ecosystem design is the future

So, what sets ecosystem design apart from user-centric design? For starters, ecosystem design is a lens for product design that anticipates and welcomes inputs from the user and the other tools they use.

User-centered design assumes users will behave predictably and stay within the bounds of your design. But users have evolved quickly, and there are too many external and internal factors constantly influencing the choices they make. This means that by the time you tidily map out your user journey, the user will have likely changed their mind or performed an action you haven't anticipated.

By contrast, instead of anticipating user behavior in a point A to point B sequence, ecosystem design anticipates user misbehavior. The user subverts and breaks boundaries naturally as they interact with a product. Ecosystem design recognizes that users don't create in isolation or behave in a straightforward manner, and that as a designer, you're responsible for creating space in your ecosystem for users to choose their own renegade journeys.

No-code takes this one step further. With no-code tools, users now have more agency to "talk back" to designers with their own designs. This growing base of no-code users isn't seeking one fully-designed solution to build in. Instead, they want to design in an ecosystem using integration points between platforms that allow learning and iteration through plugins, tutorials, and shared knowledge. Think how much more useful Airtable is to you as a creator when you integrate it with Zapier.

This makes it absolutely necessary that designers think about not only customer experience but the complete ecosystem experience as well.

Instead of seeing misbehavior as a form of user rebellion, I would like to offer this perspective: when someone off-roads away from the user path you thought you understood, you probably should embrace that direction and even enable it.

Responsibility in ecosystem design

At the heart of ecosystem design is a commitment to uphold the users' ever-evolving needs above your own bias or ego — much like the original goal of user-centered design. Now a designer's commitment must extend to letting users blur the lines between your design and others' because trapping your user within a tiny linear system within one platform is now the least user-centered decision that you could make.

The ecosystem of open-source software was supposed to be the best example of this ideal: A true commons where ideas could be freely shared for the betterment of mankind. However, that commons — to its detriment — has ended up being more code-centric than people-centric. As Don Goodman-Wilson pointed out: "Openness is not an end in itself, but a tool that we can use for good or ill."

Truly user-centered design leaves space for gray areas and for the user to make their own choices you wouldn't have thought of — but it also provides transparent guardrails while recognizing that those guardrails must constantly be reconsidered, too.

If an ecosystem is healthy, it encourages biodiversity. For an ecosystem to survive, you also can't let it be burned down.

Ecosystems are designed for interoperability

While we may compare design teams to sports teams or compare UX design to building roads for users to get from one place to another, it's truly more complicated than that. For myself, design is a big community garden with new members joining every day — bringing their own tools, processes, and perspectives. Even though there might be some rows and planters that provide order, for these gardens to yield fruit, they mostly have to be allowed to grow in whatever direction they need to. Similarly, design should be interoperable, meaning for it to thrive best — its environment should be organic and free-flowing.

At Webflow, having an ecosystem design mindset means we design to enable and encourage that organic flow between our own platform and other tools. In nature, nothing functions in complete isolation. Ecosystems are interdependent, full of symbiotic relationships. Likewise, ecosystem design works toward interoperability, where the whole system functions best and becomes more resilient the more it adapts.

I know this because we live it here every day. Webflow started out as a tool for developers and designers, but has evolved into a tool for other types of users, like marketers. Instead of keeping them out or creating new narrow lanes for these types of users or just solving this design problem with add-ons, we made Webflow into an ecosystem — where every user can make what they want (even if it means working with other tools) without having to be shoved into a box.

Interoperability is a sacrifice. It's hard to let go of controlling your products in order to serve the user's real needs of flexibility and inter-dependability. It's also the most important thing about ecosystem design. If you're truly being user-centered, then you have to connect a tunnel between your platform and others. You have to be vulnerable enough to keep those tunnels open and allow two-way communication between them. You have to be ready to learn where you failed to design for the user and expand your ecosystem to make room for them. You'll need to develop your prediction skills, to read the tracks in the dirt, to better anticipate change, to follow the user's evolution in real time. Keeping the user at the center will always be the right call. Now, you have to give the user the power of choice, too.