If you look down on the users you design for, your design is unlikely to be good design
Summary
- If you look down on the users you design for, your design is unlikely to be good design
- Ideally the designer would also be a user of the product designed
Details
- If you look down on the users of your product, you are likely not trying to make a good design
References
Quotes
You're most likely to get good design if the intended users include the designer himself. When you design something for a group that doesn't include you, it tends to be for people you consider less sophisticated than you, not more sophisticated. And looking down on the user, however benevolently, always seems to corrupt the designer. I suspect few housing projects in the US were designed by architects who expected to live in them. You see the same thing in programming languages. C, Lisp, and Smalltalk were created for their own designers to use. Cobol, Ada, and Java were created for other people to use.
If you think you're designing something for idiots, odds are you're not designing something good, even for idiots.
Even if you're designing something for the most sophisticated users, though, you're still designing for humans. It's different in research. In math you don't choose abstractions because they're easy for humans to understand; you choose whichever make the proof shorter. I think this is true for the sciences generally. Scientific ideas are not meant to be ergonomic.
Over in the arts, things are different. Design is all about people. The human body is a strange thing, but when you're designing a chair, that's what you're designing for, and there's no way around it. All the arts have to pander to the interests and limitations of humans. In painting, for example, all other things being equal a painting with people in it will be more interesting than one without. It is not merely an accident of history that the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people. If they hadn't been, painting as a medium wouldn't have the prestige it does.
Morale is key in design. I'm surprised people don't talk more about it. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you're bored when you're drawing something, the drawing will look boring. For example, suppose you have to draw a building, and you decide to draw each brick individually. You can do this if you want, but if you get bored halfway through and start making the bricks mechanically instead of observing each one, the drawing will look worse than if you had merely suggested the bricks.
Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged. In software, my rule is: always have working code. If you're writing something you'll be able to test in an hour, you have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you. The same is true in the arts, and particularly in oil painting. Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it. If you work this way, then in principle you never have to end the day with something that looks unfinished. Indeed, there is even a saying among painters: "A painting is never finished. You just stop working on it." This idea will be familiar to anyone who has worked on software.
Morale is another reason that it's hard to design something for an unsophisticated user. It's hard to stay interested in something you don't like yourself. To make something good, you have to be thinking, "wow, this is really great," not "what a piece of shit; those fools will love it."
Design means making things for humans. But it's not just the user who's human. The designer is human too.