For almost twenty years my friend Vanessa and I have laugh-cried together at how projects all go to hell in roughly the same way. We are Gen-X. Bitter truths are hilarious to us.
Design projects deteriorate in four stages:
- Make it awesome
- Make it better
- Make it suck less
- Make it stop
Ha, ha, ha and ha.
Today I realized something important and serious about this design deterioration path.
Each of these stages is a revelation of the kind of project the design team has been hired to do. Each step is a disappointing discovery of the true constraints and feasible goals of a project, initially overoptimistically presented as a design project, with the usual goals designers pursue, namely producing something useful, usable and desirable. To recap:
- Useful: The design satisfies functional needs.
- Usable: The design minimizes functional obstacles.
- Desirable: The design is valuable beyond its function.
“Make it awesome” is the goal of a project where a team has been challenged with transcending mere function and is aspiring to design something special and differentiated. The goals is not only usable usefulness, but also desirability — felt meaning.
“Make it better” is the goal of a project where a team has been charged with producing good functionality. Desirability is a nice-to-have, but the main goal is usable usefulness.
“Make it suck less” is the goal of a project where a team has been tasked with fixing broken functionality. Desirability is out of the question. Usable-enough usefulness is the goal. This is no longer really a design project. It is mostly design-informed repair work.
“Make it stop” is the team’s realization that the damage is beyond what a design team, and probably any team, can address. The organization is incapable of allowing anyone to repair what they themselves make irreparable.