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Design Talk 101: How to Discuss Design Without Being a Designer
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How do you critique product design when you’re not a designer? In this episode of Decoder, we’re breaking down the art of design communication to help non-designers collaborate effectively with design teams. Sara Altenhoff sits down with Sourcetoad’s CEO Greg Ross-Munro and VP of UX Justin Davis to explore how to navigate design conversations and avoid the dreaded “it just doesn’t feel right” feedback trap.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- How to express your design concerns clearly and constructively.
- Key principles and terms to help you describe “good” vs. “bad” design.
- Real-world tips for developing your sense of good design taste.
From understanding the “language” of design to recognizing successful digital products, this episode is packed with actionable insights for anyone involved in product development. Whether you’re a business owner, stakeholder, or simply curious about UX, this is your ultimate guide to mastering design critique.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Decoder Podcast, where we demystify the world of software development for our listeners. We'll take you behind the scenes of a software development agency to explore how digital products are crafted from concept to completion. So I'm Sarah Altenhoff, and today I'm joined by I'm Greg Rossman Roe.
SPEAKER_03And I am Justin Davis. Hi guys.
SPEAKER_04Hey Justin. Hey Greg.
SPEAKER_03How are you doing? Happy Friday again.
SPEAKER_04Happy Friday. So today we're going to talk about product design critiques. So we're going to give you tips on how to critique products effectively. Our goal is to help you engage with designers and developers more effectively for a more seamless product development experience. So we're going to cover how to communicate your various design concerns, what is the language of digital product design, and sort of how to recognize a good design versus a bad design.
SPEAKER_03Are we doing it from like a general perspective, or are we saying are we saying there's a good way to do this? Or are we going to say like you can there's a scale between making somebody feel like it's not really a big deal to making them cry? I think we're going to shoot for somewhere along that line. Yes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So first before we dive in, Justin, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background? And then Greg, you could give us your background, and we can explain like all of our perspectives here. So Justin.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Over here at Source Ode, I am the uh I am our VP of UX, so I oversee kind of all the design, overall design and user experience of the products, as well as down to the visual design layer as well. I've been an engineer for golly, I don't know, since like 1997 or whatever I started writing code. So I don't know, 20, 30, 25 years, something like that. I've been writing code. I've built a number of different I've built a ton of products, designed hundreds of thousands of products for clients over the past 20 years. Um and so I'm pretty full stack in terms of product. Um have seen a lot, come from an architecture and design background, actually, which is what I went to school for. So I have a little bit of formal design training and a whole lot of skin my knees design training.
SPEAKER_03You have there's no way you have had you designed hundreds of thousands of products. There's no way you designed hundreds. No, hundreds or thousands. Oh, hundreds or thousands. Okay, sorry.
SPEAKER_00It might be over the thousand partners. I don't know. Okay, fine. I mean, that's fair. Not hundreds of thousands, no, no, no. That's fast, but I'm not that fast.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I uh and my my story uh kind of dovetails a little bit with with Justin's because uh I started designing games when I was a kid, writing code for the games, and um always kind of enjoyed more the design side. Not just like the like the architectural design, but the actual like graphic engines and the background creation systems, those are the things that I really was drawn to. And those are what I programmed as a result back in the day before you had like a lot of management software and stuff. And then from a like a professional perspective, um you know, I started uh I don't know, I've been doing building custom software for people for I don't know, since I was like 15 or something, so like almost 30 years. And uh most of the time, I was kind of like one foot in the design world and one foot in the d development world, and most of the time I was doing both. And I always thought that I was good at both, to be honest. I thought like, oh yeah, I'm a pretty good designer. I'm a pretty good developer. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not very good at either of those things. I'm just like Duncan Dunning Kruger effect, right? Which is the more I've gotten to know people and work with people who are actually like, oh, this guy's a really good designer, or she's an amazing developer, you realize how bad you are at all these things. So uh yeah, um there you go. That's my background, sir. I'm a bad designer and a bad software engineer. Perfect.
SPEAKER_04So a perfect scene.
SPEAKER_03This is really depressing.
SPEAKER_04So uh we could dive in and um we can use this sort of app idea that we've talked about a few times on this podcast that I have about building an app to help people with orchids and other houseplants.
SPEAKER_03We're gonna have to build this thing, Justin. I yeah.
SPEAKER_04So let's walk let's walk through this whole episode and kind of refer back to this app idea I have. Um so say I'm working with a development team, you know, it's my very first app I've ever paid to have developed. Um, and the first um visuals I'm seeing of the app, um, I really don't like how they look. Um but since I don't I've never gone through this process before, I don't really know how to communicate what I like and what I don't like about the design. Um so Justin, can you give some pointers on how I can more effectively communicate the dis the dissatisfaction I have with the apps look to my development team in a way that they can like you know respond to that in a in an effective way?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's a really great question. And it's one that is a little harder, it's a little trickier sometimes because sometimes you'll look at something yo, I just don't I don't I just don't like it.
SPEAKER_03I I I don't like this thing. Right? Okay, I I've I've said in this room, can I can I be can I I'll be can I be the client for a second, Justin?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.
SPEAKER_03Like I I can't put my finger on it. I just it just it's not what I imagined in my head. It doesn't pop enough. Um it's not colorful enough, doesn't really stand out, um, and it just looks like everything else. And I just don't know what it is really that I don't like about it, but it needs it, it's just something is not going right here. Have you heard that before?
SPEAKER_00I have definitely heard that before. And the thing that I would ask at that point, that I would ask to a client then, and I think as a client, if you're on the other side, you can ask yourself, is you stop and say, hey, why is that? I heard some things in what you just said that I know are values of yours, right? Obviously, differentiation is important. It sounds like you want something that feels kind of unique, like it has your brand personality on it. That tells me something a little bit about what you value as a client or what I think you value, right? So my job now, in my role as a designer and as a service provider, is to say, okay, awesome. So what I hear you saying to me, active listening, is um I hear that you're saying that you don't like it, that that it doesn't feel differentiated enough. Like it's not, it's not delivering impact in the way you want to. And what I would then ask is I would say, talk to me more about why that is so important to you and the brand and how that gets expressed elsewhere so we can understand that, right? And so I would probably I would probably uh approach it that way. And so when you are are looking at at giving some feedback on something and you're thinking, oh man, I don't know how to give feedback, what should I say? I would say, like, say the same thing that I say to my kids when they're trying foods and they go, I don't like this food, right? I give them something to eat, and they're like, I don't like this. And I say, don't just say you don't like it. Because that's not helpful to anybody, and it gets very repetitive. Um but why don't you like it? Pick something out about it that you don't like. Is it a texture? It's too crunchy, it's too slimy, it's too whatever. Is it a colored thing? Is it a tasting? Is it too acidic? Is it too whatever? Right? When you're looking at a design, think why don't I like this? Is it that it's too pale, it's not colorful enough, right? It's not what are some go behind the I don't like it and start to unpack why. Now, that may not be easy at first. It's not quite as easy sometimes as it is with food, because we practice that quite a bit. But as you do that more and more, you'll develop more of a muscle for sort of connecting with the real reasons that you don't like what you're seeing, and that'll help you express better where you see those gaps.
SPEAKER_03What and what if they just say, what if they can't like, what if like I am in a conversation where I don't actually have the answers to those questions? Where it's like, well, you asked me like why it's important to be differentiated, and the answer is, well, because I don't want to be like everybody else. Right? Like that's a pretty that's a fairly common thing for people to say. It's like I want my app to stick out. I want my website to stick out, I want my logo to stick out in in my space. And um maybe that's actually more of a philosophical question, really, than like a design critique question. Because there's like so much education that's needed in the the marketing and the go-to-market kind of side of that. That's that the question almost that's not a design critique question. You're too far down the chain at that point. If you do you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting point because like you could also sort of like approach that and say, like, that is a need, that's a feeling that like you can empathize with, right? And you can, of course, you want to be different, you're making a product, you want it to be different in the market, you want it to have its own identity, right? So and we can talk about why that's important, and I think some of those reasons why that's important is pretty like obvious, right? Some of those things we don't even need to really talk about. Then we can talk about like what is the value of being differentiated in this market? Let's talk about what the other competitors look like and how they work and how differentiated do we actually have to be. Remember, design is problem solving, right? It's not necessarily just like expressing art onto the world. What we're trying to do is we're trying to gain an advantage by using this thing to get some other goal for our product or our company. So then we can quantify that and we can say, okay, let's look across the landscape and see. The other thing you can do in that moment is you can say, what else are we doing in our business with our logo, with our website, with our marketing, with our other advertising, the marketing cloud, or whatever it is, where we are also doing that differentiation. Have we brought that over to the design team and communicated to them, hey, here's these assets that we have. Like when we go put a sign out, when we put an ad out, we always do this crazy yellow guy. Like, oh, you've never seen the crazy yellow guy? You gotta put the yellow guy in, right? And sometimes it's easy to forget that people experience your brand across multiple channels, sometimes simultaneously, oftentimes very quickly, like or you know, across time, whatever. Um, and so make sure that you were pulling like design, if you're trying to create differentiation and you're trying to use design as a competitive advantage, it's used across the entire enterprise, not just in the product. And so it actually should just end up in the product. And if it isn't ending up in the product, it may mean that it isn't at the enterprise level, or is it being communicated to the product team that it is being done though?
SPEAKER_03Okay. So I have a question then for both of you, because both of you guys, um, Sarah, you do a lot of you do a lot more design work than I do these days, even though we're talking about your app. And Justin, you kind of do design, I guess, for a living. Um like large portions of the both of you are like designed for a living. When b if and you've you've probably you both had to like work with me in situations where I've been like, I don't like that. Like I want to change this one thing about it. What is it important that when someone's giving you design feedback like that, that I'm not gonna hurt your feelings? Is that important? Is that a consideration? Like, if if if you tell me like, if if I come to you and I say, Oh, this is this is really not good. Are you gonna cry yourself to sleep tonight? I mean that's I'm I'm serious. Like, uh and then like is there a better way to and then and if I hurt your feelings enough, are you not gonna want to continue to do good work? Are you gonna like end up presenting me? Like, how should I even take that from an emotional standpoint of you? Or or should I not care? Are you just like professionals and you're just used to people being crazy?
SPEAKER_04I think from my point of view from working with you, I you could never hurt my feelings by giving me like like feedback on designs, because I I'm pretty good at separating that from like my feelings.
SPEAKER_03Um I'm gonna push this now. Okay, thank you.
SPEAKER_04So like say, and this has actually happened, this is a real example. Um I made like a landing page and there were some square boxes, and you were like, I'm not really, I don't really like the but you gave me specific feedback. You weren't like, I don't like it. You were like, what's with the square boxes here? I'm not really I'm like, okay, I don't care. I'm like, let's make them round. Like, if you're not liking the square. So in that case, like it was helpful that you said specifically what you didn't like. Um, and I didn't care. I'm like, okay, I'm not married to the square boxes, let's make them round. Like, hey.
SPEAKER_03Okay, that's fair. I got a follow-up question for that, but I'm curious about Justin's answer as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I feel like for me, um, I struggled with this. Honestly, I struggled with this for a long time early in my career. Um, and you hear as a designer all the time, like, you are not your work, your work is not you, separate it. If people critique your work, it's not critiquing you, blah, blah. I did not believe that for years. I mean, I believed it in my head, but I could not get my heart to believe it for a long time, right? And like every time somebody said something, it hurt, right? And I was like, what? This is not good. And over time, you develop a the ability with practice to distance yourself from your work better and say, like, this is just a thing I made. And if it's not right, it's not right. We'll find a better way to do it, right? And that's that is what it is. Um, I think that like as a client, you owe it to express your feelings. You shouldn't worry about hurting somebody's feelings. You should now, you shouldn't be violent, you shouldn't say, this piece of whatever garbage, garbage, trash, trash, this piece of trash, I can't believe you gave this to me. I mean, you shouldn't be like that. Again, when we align this OKD's app design isn't good enough for a fertilizer. Right. But when we do when we have conversations about design around goals, right, and we say, I don't feel like this design accomplishes this goal because of these reasons, we take the personal bit out of it, right? And now we're just all sitting around looking at a problem that we're still trying to solve together. Um I think it takes a while to get, as a designer, I can tell you, it takes a while to get good at that and to get comfortable with that um level of distancing, but but at the end of the day, the design isn't you. It is just an attempt to solve a problem, and most of the time we don't solve problems right the first time. We always have to rewrite books.
SPEAKER_03Like when is it your responsibility though? Like at some point, like the stakeholder, the whoever whoever's paying for it at the end of the day is ultimately the client or whatever, so the the customer. So the customer's always right. But is there like is there a time when you you have to step back and say, like, no, the customer is not right? Like, I'm gonna fight this. Like, you can't this I have thought through this more than you have.
SPEAKER_00Yes. I it that's a hard place to be in sometimes, yes. You and I we've been in this we've been in this We've been in this situation uh before. Um there's kind of a couple answers to that. One is I I I I have developed over the years a very pick my battles approach to this. Some things, because I can quickly think about what the effects are of a thing on a like, okay, you want that little thing, you want it like that, who cares? Like it's not really gonna have a big impact. I will give you that. Like, not a big deal, right? Sometimes there are times that I see things where I'm like, there's such a large-scale problem here that as a professional, I've spent 20 years studying this. I like I do it every day, all day, in and out. I am very good at knowing what is and is not successful in building products at this point because I've had a lot of experience doing it. And so I believe that when clients come to me as a provider, as a vendor, whatever, that I have a certain level of professional responsibility to say, hey, listen, based on what I know, and again, I'm not gonna go back to you and say, I don't like this, I think this is ugly. I'm gonna come back to you with the exact same level of rigor that I want out of you as a client in the design discussion, and I'm gonna say, I have concerns about this design. Um the concerns that I have are that it doesn't match accessibility standards, or it's gonna be very difficult and hard to build, and given what you've told me about what your goals are, I don't know that you're gonna get the payback here. Or you're trying to do something here that actually is against a standard pattern for which a lot of other users are using other apps and then they come to your app and then your app does it differently. And that's not the kind of differentiation that you want that causes usability problems. And usability problems lead to support problems, and support costs money. And so we can and so like we can what I like to do is like tell the story about how these design decisions, it's not about taste. It's never about taste. It's always about is this effective for what we're trying to do? And I sometimes it is our responsibility to step in and say, I understand that you want what you want, and I can empathize with you wanting to express yourself in your product, and we can find ways to do that. But we shouldn't do it in ways that are going to harm the user's experience along the way. So let's find the middle ground there.
SPEAKER_04So it almost kind of gets more into like a business strategy advice there, because you're yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because at the end of the day, we're not doing design for fun, we're doing design because it's a necessary thing. By the way, nobody wants to interact with a UI. No one wakes up in the morning and it's like, oh man, I'm gonna get some coffee, and I can't wait to go use a web app today, right? Nobody is excited about using web app.
SPEAKER_03There is a in the Spider-Man in the Spider-Man 2 game, the movement between buildings is so good and you can still fast travel. You can still travel around anywhere you want in New York, and I will still swing from building to building. It is not necessarily I will interact with that UI as a as a form of relaxation.
SPEAKER_00Just because it feels so good. I love it. But most normal people without severe mental ailments don't actually I don't go play with my spreadsheets that way. Yeah. Right. And so the thing to remember is design, we only do design, and I think this way about code too. We only have to do design because we have to. Because we have to give the users a user interface, right? They they aren't asking for it. And so I think you have to sort of just check yourself. We're not building, we're not making art. We are trying to solve a problem that ultimately at the end of the day is trying to get a business objective.
SPEAKER_04So I think this is a good segue into like the actual language of design. Um so we know that it's not good to just give very vague feedback, like, oh, I feel that this, you know, it just doesn't feel right, etc. So what type of language should clients be using, um, clients and stakeholders be using when they're discussing design? So say I receive some visuals from the company I'm working with, and they've used all these like photorealistic sort of icons, and I am like, oh, I don't like those. What's a way I could communicate that in using specific design language to get the outcome that I want?
SPEAKER_03I feel I I feel this a lot, which is that because I give actually more I give more feedback now than I do actually more design. I only ever sketch things and show them, then give them to people like Justin and like actually make them into something that like works. But um building vocabulary around what it is that you're trying to express is a responsibility of yours if you want to give design direction. If you are working with designers, the same way if you're working with developers, or if you're working with like if you're building a custom house and you don't like educate yourself, if you don't pick up a book about like building custom houses, whatever, to be you're gonna be part of the problem.
SPEAKER_00Or about houses in general. If you don't know what a soft is, and you just say, I don't like how the top part is kind of dangly, then like that's not it's not like a helpful piece of feedback.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Your tendency came out a little bit there.
SPEAKER_03No, but like there is there is there is some there's some you don't have to be an expert. There's a couple of good books you can even just one good book. I mean, Justin's always promoting one. Um, but which which was a game changer for me um as well. But um which is called what Justin? We're not plugging a product here or anything.
SPEAKER_00It's called Discussing Design. Uh fantastic about just doing design critique, uh written by two guys who are who are phenomenal colleagues of mine, um, who I used to see a lot of the conference circuit circuit um remarkable designers on the But uh you know, um talking there's there's two things I think you should do.
SPEAKER_03One is educate yourself to some degree so that some of the language you use uh and some of the ways that you talk about this cr about critiquing is That you have some common vocabulary, right? Like, oh okay, I know that they are using a design framework or they're like this is more flat design versus uh something that's trying to have shadows or something like that, right? Um some language around that is your responsibility. And the problem with that is that people don't think of design a lot of the time, I think, as a learnable uh a learnable skill. They think about they the whole world around you is designed. And people, I think, have kind of this feeling that it's a it's a it's something you pick up, it's something you have, it's a skill, or it's something that is innate with everybody. Like, oh, I I like the way that looks. I've seen the Coca-Cola the new Coca-Cola bottle packaging, and I think it's garbage, and I like the old one, and as a result, I have an opinion about design. And that is not the case. You you have an opinion about the overall aesthetic about something, but you couldn't you couldn't really describe like what it is about that particular font weight or about the kerning that you that it is that's like just throwing you off a little bit, right? Or the gradient, and I'm not talking about like these specific words, but you have to have some sort of understanding of the vocabulary around that space, and an understanding that it is not just an innate an innate uh skill that you have as as a human being. It's not like your ability to smell something sweet or spicy or something. So I think that that is the first step, is is stepping back and understanding what you don't know, and then spending a little bit of time educating yourself.
SPEAKER_00I think that's right. And I think also like what you're talking about is kind of like what we were talking about a little bit earlier about like kind of asking, you know, like you know, why don't you like this? And there there's an exercise called the five whys. It's like a popular kind of thinking exercise, which is just to keep asking why. Ask why five times, right? And usually it's like getting to the question behind the question is really important, you know? And so, like, yeah, I think just continuing to ask yourself why. I don't I don't like that. Why? Well, it just feels really squished. Why? Well, like the font just looks really like I don't know, squishty kind of looking. Why? Well, because the letters like are too close together. Why? Oh, because the kerning in the letters is set to negative 25%. Great. So we can go change the kerning, spread the letters out, and now all this gets fixed. Now, I explained that from a through a like the lens of a knowledgeable designer who understands that whole chain of things. But the point is, is to continue to ask yourself why we'll get root cause, right? And root cause we can deal with. Um and so I think that's I think that's really important. Um, I think another another trick that I will tell you, and I think this is the best trick for giving better design feedback that I've ever learned in my career. And that is to stop saying the word I. Just stop saying the word I. And never say the word I like or don't like.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Because at the end of the day, it's not about taste. And so what we're actually having a discussion about is whether our users will interact with it, not what we are going to be doing with it or what we think about it, because we are not our users. Even if we are one of our users, we are not all of our users, right? And so it's not helpful because when we start to say things like, well, I don't like when that happens, or, oh, you know what I really love? I love when I use Facebook and XYZ happens. Well, that's not really helpful because that's just telling us about random things you like in apps and not things that apply here. But if you say rephrase that and take the eye out and think, what how could I better say that, instead of saying our users, okay, well, our users really like this thing on Facebook? Do we know that? Actually, now we don't. So now we need to go to research and find that out, right? Our users might find it like difficult to um to use this because of XYZ instead of I find it difficult to use this because of XYZ. That one shift in language, A, changes your perspective, and B, it's gonna make your conversations go a lot easier. Because when you start to say I, we can do a taste conversation. And if you say, I like this, somebody else is gonna go, well, I don't like this. So now we're alright. We're not in a productive place, right? But if we can externalize that and say, well, this other group of people that we're now both talking about, how do we evaluate whether or not this statement is true? Really changes everything. So stop using I and all of your things are going to get a lot better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00All not all your things, all your design discussions.
SPEAKER_04I think that's really good advice. Um so uh we're talking about taste. Um this might be a good time to transition into like good design versus bad design. Um like Justin, I'm curious if there's any things that are considered, you know, core principles of good design of that distinguishes, you know, designs from like, you know, really, really good designs versus what people consider bad designs, um, or is it all totally subjective?
SPEAKER_03Um I'll take my I'll take my shot at it first while Justin gets his thoughts the other.
SPEAKER_04Okay.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_03I th I think bad design is easier to describe than good design, for sure. Because bad design makes something harder to use, right? It makes it harder to work with. People will sometimes bad design just means that uh it's gonna make it harder for you to iterate and get more cycles out. Like you picked a design that is gonna slow down your development, and that is not you you you want to build your ORCID app, right? Like, and you've picked this intricate, like animated thing that runs up and down the side, and it had to all be hand-coded, and there's nothing that can come out of a package, and it looks beautiful, and all your users love it, and it actually serves like a cool functional purpose, and it is maybe it stands you out of the marketplace, and people are like, oh, that's very distinctive. And so all those is gonna get the good check mark. But one thing that you need to do as a company when you're you know an awkward app startup is you need to iterate really quickly. And the w the complexity of this piece of design is is slowing everybody down, that makes it bad design. That is a different way of thinking about design as good or bad, right? Uh is what it's getting in the way of. The same way with uh making something accessible. Uh allowing people who are not like you, or allowing people who are using screen readers, or um have to zoom in a lot to be able to experience it, to like if your design is not being inclusive, I would argue that's bad design. And typically, and this is this is not always the case, but the more complex and the more design there is in something, so the more leaves and flowers and graphics and stuff, the harder it's gonna be to make it inclusive as a design. The more kind of postmodern and boring and um you know, like you're looking at the notions of the world and the the Googles of the world. Those are much, much easier to make inclusive and to make accessible. Whereas uh you know, something that's pretty design heavy and looks great, like Duolingo, we we I think we we're all fans of that app. Obviously much more design heavy. I don't actually know what it looks like through a screen reader, and I'd be very curious about its accessibility. But uh that is I think that you need to like look at what the outcomes are about design and then use those to judge it as good or bad, uh, rather than on a purely aesthetic basis. Because there's an argument for like doing tongue-in-cheek bad design on purpose, like aesthetically, because like the vape vapor wave aesthetic, not saying that's bad, oh my god, I'm gonna get lynched. But uh uh but there are there are reasons to make something that is not your taste, the taste shouldn't be the answer. It's like but there are reasons like slowness, inclusivity, accessibility, uh speed of development, iteration time, uh, your user's personal tastes. Those should be taken into account. Uh and then just just to kind of mention one more thing that Justin was talking about in your last question, which was uh what it what it is take the word uh I out of the design. In the EMyth Revisited, great book, everyone should read the E Myth Revisited. He talks about logo design. Um and, you know, hey, how do you choose the right logo that you want for your new business? For a new business, right? And he said, well, it's the easiest answer in the world. You you don't know. Get five designs that you kind of like, that are different, and send them to 10 or 15 of your potential customers and ask them to vote. Because it's not even about you in any way. It is not your decision. You are trying to sell somebody something, let the people you're trying to sell it to pick the design. And so that's all I have to say about that. Sorry. There you go, Justin.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's I mean, it's exactly right. And I'm just gonna build on that and say, like, I there is no good design and there is no bad design. Like, all good all design is good and all design is bad. And the same design is also good and bad at the same time. Schrdinger's design. Um and and it is true because design is only able to be evaluated in the context of what it is trying to do. Um and so for that reason, it's hard to say if something is good or bad until we know what it's attempting to do. If you think about it, right, even even things that we think are obviously good design, Greg, you mentioned one, making something easier to use. Obviously good, right? Like we don't want things to be harder to use, except when we have major safety concerns, and we need to make it harder to do something that's super destructive or we'll kill you. And so in industrial things, when you have to flip power on and stuff, you gotta do a lot of stuff before you can do that. We actually make it intentionally harder to use because the does the goal of the design is to do that. And so it's another great example of how there's no real objective objectivity. Now, for most things, yes, it is the case that we try to make it easier to use, and that's kind of obvious. And unfortunately, because it's obvious, it is also sort of useless in terms of design critique, because it's like, well, of course, for most things, we want it to be easier to use. But saying I want it to be easier to use is not valuable feedback because it doesn't tell us how or why it is currently not easy to use, right? And so again, we're back to the question behind the question what is it about that, right? And how does it attach back to the goal?
SPEAKER_03I think I'm thinking of like a design session for Jurassic Park where someone's like, where the usability experts like the button for turning off the electricity for the raptor cage, it seems like it's hidden in a deep menu. Like, right, shouldn't that be on the home page?
SPEAKER_00Like, why is that so hard to find?
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00And these are things that we do, right? Sometimes in design, for this is such a great example. I'll like go into that example uh specifically here. Is sometimes we take things and we intentionally hide them. We intentionally make them difficult to get to, we intentionally put them behind things because that is a design decision where we are saying we want the user to do this thing instead of this thing. Or this is a highly destructive thing. So we're gonna put it way down here and we're gonna make you type the word danger before you delete it, right? Because we want you to really be sure that you're going to do this.
SPEAKER_03In best case, you're talking about best case scenarios. Most of the time that's used for things like the unsubscribe button or like cancel my cancel my account, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, absolutely right. Yes, I cannot be responsible for over hijacking these concepts. Um but yeah, I think there are certainly some things that we could say are classical design things. You can look at the gestalt principles of design, things like balance symmetry, things like that, right? Which we could say are aspects that make things aesthetically more pleasurable to look at, usually for most people. Um, and that is the case, and I think that if you want to get into the details of design, it does behoove you to learn a little bit about like color theory and the gestalt principles and some of that if you want to. But honestly, if I am somebody who is building an ORCIDs app, and my goal is to get a lot of people who are using my app to do orchids, I don't want to become a designer because I got other things to do to get my app to market and to make sure that my ORCID app works great. And design is probably not one of the most important things. So I'm probably not gonna spend my time time to get good at design. I'm going to find somebody who I trust knows what they're doing, and I'm going to have helpful critique sessions with them. Um, but at the end of the day, I'm not gonna worry about trying to learn about the gestalt principles because it's not really going to uh pay off for me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I uh my other book recommendation is I think one on my shelf, which is um uh Steven Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. Um I think it's I don't know if it's like super up to date or anything, but uh pick that up and yeah. And then what was your suggestion, Justin? Critiquing design. Disgusting design.
SPEAKER_00Uh disgusting design. Disgusting design. Yeah, yeah. By the way, it's uh quick note about Steve Kruger. Steve Krug, I had the uh the pleasure of speaking to him at a at a uh conference in Lisbon like now it's about like 12 years ago or something like that. And he does something so cool when he gives talks. You know, most people they'll give a talk and on stage they'll say, Do you have any questions? Right? Whatever, and they'll stand up there and ask questions. When he takes questions, he gets off stage and he walks to the person and stands in front of them and answers it to them face to face instead of just answering it from the stage. And he'll walk around, he'll be like, Anybody's have any questions? Someone'll ask a question, he'll walk over to them, just have a discussion. And it like made such a profound impact on me because it was such a small change that made the overall experience for that person asking the question so much more personal, it it just remarkable.
SPEAKER_03That's cool.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, that's my Steve Crew story.
SPEAKER_04So, like for our final point, I want us to talk about it's kind of related to our discussion: good what is good, what is bad, like nothing's good, nothing's bad. It's more about goals. Um, but what about like good taste? Developing good taste and design. I'm interested in what both of you have to say. Um you've already given some book recommendations. You have any like specific like websites or product examples? We've already touched on Duolingo that demonstrate like good taste and what you consider good taste in design. Um we can also talk about examples of like bad taste, because like we said, bad bad taste can sometimes be easier to identify than good.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, uh I think Justin and I both said a few times that design is not about taste, but there's another part of me which wants to kind of say something different, and it's not that design is not that taste does not enter into it. It is that is like what is taste? Let's just look at that word for a second. And it is a way, a set of like heuristics almost that are built up into you over time and experience, typically with being reinforced with educating yourself purposefully. Right? Nobody ever like wakes up thinking, you know, oh, I've suddenly started loving opera. No, you like start to like like opera a little bit, and then you like read a book about it, and then you start listening to more opera, and then you like take a course on opera, and over time you kind of you're now like, oh, I can I can pick a verdi out of like out of a crowd, no problem. Like whatever, you become like an opera nerd or something. I don't know why I picked opera.
SPEAKER_04It's sort of like saying something, you know, I think that's a good example because it's not very like beginner-friendly. Um sort of like scotch, like, or you know, beer.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, which I probably pick pick more freely. Um and so so I think what I mean by I think what we when I'm gonna talk about design taste is the ability for me to look at something very quickly and without actually being able to describe it myself exactly, I can tell you if it's good or bad. I can look at something and say, that's great. And the reason I can do that is because I've done it thousands of times. And I've had this conversation a thousand times. And now, and then I went and read the books and I've designed things myself, and as a result, I I have like a taste of how things should look and feel. And then the thing that moderates that all the time is I know really good designers, and I know people who um will look at something and will spot stuff I've missed, and they have better taste. And then I think that just means they have like better heuristics. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about here, Justin, if you have you feel that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's a it's a it's definitely an interesting point. Um I think that um taste as heuristics is an interesting uh is an interesting idea for sure. Um and I and I think that one thing you said is to to an extent is it like it does take reps, right? I mean, and there there are some things that like those of us who've done it for years and years and years, and and I'm the same way, I can look at something and I can immediately tell you if I believe that it is good or bad, and again, in context of the goals that it's trying to achieve. And there are some things that I can look at usually and I can tell you off the rip whether or not there are marks of quality, right? Like I can look and tell if there are, if it looks like there's a level of polish, right, versus not a level of polish. Now that's something that is something that I think takes a long time to be able to spot and be able to understand, and that's just evaluating designs over and over and over and over, and again, continuing to ask why, right? I think that if you want to develop good taste, the best thing you can do is just walk around the world, and this isn't just web apps, just walk around the world and be like, why do I like this? Why do I like my car? Why don't I like my car? Why do I like my house? Why do I not like my house? What are the things about it that I don't like? And in that introspection, with if you if you do that with everything you come in contact with, which is probably my like ADHD, like I just everything I ask, I'm like, why don't I like that? Or why do I like this, right? And so I do this introspection all the time. But you start to develop the vocabulary and you practice more and more how to take what your eyes are sensing and turn that into some kind of interpretation that your brain can like like make a point of view about, right? That's deeper than just like, I don't like it. Um and I think that the more that you do that, and quite honestly, I will be so bold as to say, I think the more you do that with everything in your life, the better critical thinker you will become in general. And that will ultimately make you better at understanding design and knowing what is and is not good when you see it, because a lot of it is about critical thinking.
SPEAKER_03I would say that there's um the one I'll leave you with this, sir. Like, there's a game that I've always enjoyed sending out um there's it's it's can't unsee. Uh and I think it's like C-A-N-T-U-N-S-E-E dot space. Um like I can't can't unsee that. I sorry, my accent is weird, so you probably have to repeat that. Um and if you search for that, it's a it's a UI quiz where they took two uh pieces of design next to each other, and you have to pick which one is correct. And they get hotter and hotter and hotter. And every now and again um we will run that game at the company, and it I will get, you know, I think there's like 20, 30 questions or something. And it's fun, it's a fun game. You get like coins for each right answer you get. And the consistent top scorers are always the people who are better with design who like who can do it. Uh and the people at the bottom, they're just not as good. And so we give them less design than UI UX tasks. So go and play that and see what your score is.
SPEAKER_00And again, that's about reps. The people who've just done a more just I mean, it's like anything else, right? Um, I think that, yeah, I would say that, you know, if you want to get better at design and you want to get good at this, I don't think I would focus on, you know, I wouldn't focus on trends, I wouldn't focus on fads, should this should we use rounded corners, should we not use rounded corners, should we use big drop shadows or not big drop shadows, right? Of course, some of those things are things you have to take into consideration just in terms of fad and taste, especially if you're doing consumer-facing things. But I think if I were going to tell somebody who want really was eager to understand and learn about design how to get better at it, I would say focus on like first principles and fundamentals. What makes the world work and how does design make things work, right? At a at a very low level. And one of the best books on this, and I I I think that everyone in design who's doing this professionally should read this book. If you're not doing this professionally, you should not read this book because you will not make it through it. Um, but there's a book called The Design of Everyday Things. And this was written in like the 18 or the 1980s, like 88, I think, or so. And um what's beautiful about this book is it was written before the era of the web and UIs and all of this kind of thing, the type of design that we're talking about today, right? It was well before we could ever make ORCID apps. But what he goes through is he talks about like, why are your light switches in the places that they are in your house? Why are your stove knobs arranged the way that they are? Why do certain things you interact with in the world, like door handles and stuff like that, work in the way that they do? And what was the idea behind the design? And those are the really foundational first principles of design that if you know those, you can apply them to anything. You can apply them to web apps, you can apply them to anything else, and many of the things will just automatically get solved. It all starts from first principles, and all the other stuff on top is really a lot less important.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that sounds like a great book. Um this was really fun, Greg and Justin. Thanks so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_03Um pleasure. My pleasure.
SPEAKER_04So we cover a lot of ground. Um we talked about how to communicate your design concerns, like what type of language to use, uh, what is good versus bad design. It turns out all design is good at good and bad. So that's good to know. Um and then we gave some tips on how to develop good taste in design. Um so to our listeners, we all encourage you to go out in the world, observe, think critically about things that you are seeing and interacting with and what you like and don't like about them. And maybe you can apply that to your ORCID app that you're designing, like I will. Um so thanks for joining us, listeners. And if you want more insight into various software and digital product development topics, then please join us next time and like and subscribe and follow Decoder Podcast. Until next time, take care.
SPEAKER_03Thanks, Ever.