“I just design based on my instinct. The specifications give me the goals but these cannot guide me how to design,” said a designer in our product team meeting. It was in the year 2015, and I am just guessing that they are still designing on their vibes.
Can you design based on your vibes?
Well, startups do that particularly when their designers use border-radius because it does not matter for their immediate goals and also because they cannot afford to invest in the systems when they are early.
Their marketers design the sign up forms based on their vibes although they might realize it much later how it hurts their goals.
Technology design is engineered based on logic, and for certain goals. We enable the engineering goals by designing the interface and the interactions. There is some science in the code. We use our judgment, experience, and the knowledge from the community but we cannot design for the vibes. Vibes are too random and these could be so raw. Vibes are certainly different from our judgment and I totally believe in using our judgment in our work.
Talk about vibes and I love the food industry. I am not an expert in foodtech but I love the way chefs plan and design their dishes by following whatever science they know for their work. While in a restaurant, I often get this feeling that the chefs prepare their dishes on vibes even if they have been doing it to the same dish every day.
When a chef experiments with a dish, the stake are different and the audience preparedness is different. In design, you cannot rely on your vibes. Peter Bogaards has written many posts on the intersection of food and UX. Peter presented on in the EuroIA (see slides on Slideshare).
