One time when I was in my college, we called a plumber to fix a leaking pipe. The leak was somewhere under the ground and so the plumber had to take out a few floor tiles to locate the leaking point. I saw how he used a small piece of a water pipe, an elbow, a socket too on the bend, and a paste that was probably meant to serve as a glue. The bend was immediately below the intersection of two walls and so he had to change his body position a couple of teams to get into the right angle of his hands to hold his wrench.
While watching this whole exercise, I casually remarked that it must be a very difficult job—to be in awkward positions while keeping their hands still, with a certain grip on the wrench, and dealing with those instruments. There must be some science behind it.
“Fairly easy—I have learnt it by practice.” he said. “In some cases, I needed to make sure that the pipeline does not interfere with other fittings within the wall, and also that the tiles do not break. It is just about using the right material in the right proportion, at the right location, and for the right reason. Do not worry, this is my job, and not hard at all.”
I experienced something similar when we hired an architect to design and then oversee the construction of our house. I would often see him giving instructions to the contractors, helping them follow the floor plans, elevations, and the wedges. It made me feel that it was an incredibly complicated job and when I asked, the architect said—”Sticking to the basic principles of design, and by building the peripheral awareness of how we should work with the people who own this house, and their lifestyle—this is not hard at all.”
Recently, I am seeing some posts and discussions on *design is hard* in our technology work. Chris Gray (see their LinkedIn) wrote a post, and Scott Berkun has recently published a book on why design is hard.
There is a very common argument in design that design itself is not hard but making it work, and then the challenges of working with people for their own context, versions, and the other business-cultural variables makes design hard.
I do not question the authors’ opinions or experiences—design can be hard in some ways. But so is sales. And marketing too. And if in doubt, ask a content designer or a product content strategist.
This is true for doctors as well—the stakes they have to understand a patient, their lifestyle, the family history, the work conditions or adjacent profile details that help the doctor to know the patient’s health system closely. And they are dealing for a life—and a network of lives.
This is true for plumbers too—we see the state of buildings—office, malls, and multi-housing complex where the apartments leak for months and sometimes for years because there is no easy or affordable fix because of the wrong strategy by the plumbers during the building’s construction. It impacts life. Of elders, kids, of relationships—and imagine that many of them are already dealing with the poorly designed apps designed by us.
This is true for support center distributors too, for their own domain-centric and audience-specific challenges. And for many other practitioners in different disciplines.
Talk about digital product design, I believe that design is relatively easy because we are so privileged in so many ways.
- Look at the huge support system that we have around online—people willing to help us, answer our questions, and guide us. I am part of a few Slack communities and it is wonderful to see the strangers who do not know you at all are willing to help with right references for the right reasons, and quickly. Isn’t it amazing?
- Most of the designer work in teams—small or big which means that they have the support to validate the utility and usefulness of their design work. Engineering helps design in many ways because experienced designers develop this judgment how they both enable each other. Likewise, modern practices in user research and discovery, the marketing strategy, the content design—all these give a lot of base and the right foundations for design to make sense.
- Technology in the form of design tools such as Figma, or process tools such as Linear, Slack, Loom, and even the modern prompt engineering powered tools.
It confuses me when I read “Design is hard” by a designer.
If there is a business case, a set of user stories, enough evidence backed by our own judgment and experience, the support system around us in other teams and functions, the community support, modern design tools, and when the customers are not extraordinarily demanding in their expectations, and particularly when design’s job is not to sell it directly to the customers (there are people who take care of selling the product for its audience), we should say that design is not hard.
Design is not hard by any means.
Imagine that you need to design a calendar to show doctor’s appointments that are confirmed. So, there are a series of steps or actions that we need to design—sign up, profile, search, questions and contact, see pricing, reviews and exclusive sections such as specialization, a few forms, grids, cards, CTAs, and the options to help them request for a booking. By using Figma, Slack, Linear, Loom, tons of free tools and utilities.
And we still say that design is hard?
Compared to what?
Whom are we blaming? People? The context? The systems?
It just boggles my mind.
PS: I had a brief Reddit discussion too on this topic—not sure of the directions it went to.
