No Free Lunches… Web design, easy to do badly
I was thinking a lot this weekend about web design and the difference in how many of my clients approach their designers and how they approach their developers. I subsequently thought about some more technical issues but let me start with this first idea.
Most people don’t understand what it is a designer does nor what it is a developer does. The difference, though, is that people think they understand what a designer does while they know they don’t understand what a developer does (not every one, but this is a very common situation in myy experience). To that degree they’ll generally defer to whatever the developer says, they might try and rush this or rush that, but in general - if the developer says this is a fact and needs to be scheduled as such it gets scheduled as such.
On the other hand, designers tend to get no such treatment. Minor tweaks this, major tweaks that, they all just get piled on the designers hapless lap. Well, maybe not hapless, but piled upon nonetheless. I’m not going into the notion of the redesigning the designers efforts, that’s for another post, but I’m just talking about how many people approach designers. The assumption is that because certain changes seem small that they are easy - which is often so far from the truth. In a good design everything is connected, colors, proportions, text, graphics, everything. So when you change something, several other facets have to change too - changes that might not even be noticed as changes (but they’d be noticed if they weren’t changed!). All of that takes time and effort.
I think people believe, somewhere deep inside, though, that if it came right down to it, they could probably do it themselves. It doesn’t seem like it’d be hard to throw up some text in photoshop and have a go at it. And this is the thing, design is something that is easy to do badly. Anyone can open up photoshop and make a “design”, it won’t be good, but they could come up with something. People, because of this, believe that while perhaps they couldn’t do it because they aren’t trained to, they believe that they understand the process and assume that once you are trained, it’s simply that you are better at this imaginary process of theirs. In fact, just like they have no idea how a developer goes about his craft, they have no idea how a designer goes about hers.
If you can’t do something and have hired someone to do that thing for you, do your homework and make sure you’re hiring someone good and then respect that you don’t know how they do it and that you’ve hired them to be the expert for a reason. Doesn’t matter if it’s design, development or accounting.
June 25th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
There’s a name for it. The Dunning-Kruger effect. “People who have little knowledge systematically think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge” and the more they learn about that subject, the more they realize how little they know.
June 25th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
Yes, but the thing about it is that a client knowing neither development nor design, will believe that he knows about design but not that he knows about development, despite the fact that he knows equally little about both.
June 25th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
That’s not a very people-ready attitude, Mr. Deasil.
June 26th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Oh, deasil’s people ready! Where’s microsoft, I’ll give them a quote. :)
(and just in case anyone’s misinterpreting - this post isn’t a value judgement on client knowledge, they aren’t expected to know anything about design or development - that’s not their business, it’s why they’ve hired people to do it for them. It is just an observation on the difference in the way they behave towards dev and design.)
June 26th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
go felix!
July 5th, 2007 at 10:21 am
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