Housewives with Flair

An interesting title for a post about User Interface (UI) design!

Recently there was a discussion on the Pragmatic Marketing Alumni group on LinkedIn regarding who should have the final say on the design of the user interface for a product - the UI Designer or the product manager? There were various opinions expressed in the discussion ranging from "it should the product manager as he or she is responsible for the overall product" to "the UI designer" to "no-one...the market will decide".

The discussion reminded me of an anecdote told to me by a VC executive a couple of years ago. Martin, the VC executive, was hosting a dinner party for some friends and his sister was one of the guests. He overheard his wife introducing his sister to some other guests and describing her as an interior decorator. His sister took offense at this description and said "No Sweetie. I am an interior designer. I went to college for four years to become an interior designer. Interior decorators are merely housewives with flair."

The point of the story is that UI designers are trained in the art of designing simple, easy-to-use interfaces - they are the experts in this area. They understand usability, look-and-feel standards, task flow, and accessibility requirements (ADA, Section 508, W3C WAI, etc). The rest of us are merely "housewives with flair" - we might think we know what a good user interface looks like, but we do not have training in this area and we are certainly not the experts. So my view is to let the experts do what you are paying them to do - if you are going to overrule their expert opinion, why do you have them in the first place?

One final point about the discussion on LinkedIn. The view that "the market will decide" has a lot of merit and is generally true. A product with a poorly designed user interface will typically fail in the market when better designed alternatives are available¹. However, I think that this view misses one salient point. Although the idea of getting feedback from your users and adapting the user interface accordingly is an excellent idea, you still need to have a user interface to show them in the first place. You cannot go to users with a blank sheet of paper and ask them what they want. (Remember...Camel = Horse designed by committee...). You can interview them to elicit input, but eventually someone in your organization needs to put together a consistent prototype or storyboard user interface which can then be used to elicit further feedback from the users. However, this prototype user interface will influence the feedback from the users - that is, their feedback will be in the context of an existing design (if only an initial prototype or storyboard) and this will, subconsciously maybe, affect their comments. The user comments are typically based on the framework of the prototype/storyboard and tend to be modifications and improvements to the existing design rather than sweeping changes that require a new design.

So, however you validate its design, you will still need to create an initial user interface of some form. Then we get back to the question of who has the final say in its design? The expert UI designer? Or the housewives with flair?

¹ Note that I qualified my statement about products with poorly designed user interfaces fail in the market by adding the caveat that this will happen when better designed alternatives are available. This is because if your product - even with its poorly design user interface - is the only product available, then it has a greater chance of being successful (if it meets a perceived user need). This is one of the factors driving the idea of the 'minimum viable product' i.e. the first version of your product doesn't need to be fully functional with all the bells and whistles of a mature product. It needs to do the core functions well - the rest can come later. This also applies to the user interface - it doesn't need to be all dancing and all singing. It needs to be easy to use to perform the core functionality of the product. The richer user interface design and full functionality can come later. 

The minimum viable product is a key tenet of 'Customer Development' as defined by Steven Gary Blank in his book "The Four Steps to the Epiphany". I'll talk more about customer development in a future post.