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As a product designer, I am and have long been looking for a company that will enable—hell, allow—me to design software that employs system standards. I can’t imagine I’m the only one. Problem is, most leadership doesn’t care about usability unless it affects marketability, which is less and less likely as people (users) become more comfortable with and accustomed to hopping between needlessly proprietary workflows and abstraction of crucial processes.* Often (usually?) designers also don’t, to be sure, but those like myself who do care are, like devs, up against unreasonable speed demands and interruptions that make it difficult to do our best, most thoughtful work. And though it may seem like design is higher up the totem pole, perhaps because it’s usually upriver from dev, in my experience, most companies see designers as whiny graphics monkeys, just as they may see devs as whiny code monkeys.+ It’s significantly more difficult and time-consuming to design novel functions and flows that conform to or complement existing standards than it is to draft a new system that need only make internal sense and may wantonly disregard the environment around it. This is why people like Electron, right? This is why people liked the internal combustion engine. * I’d like to see a study on how this kind of acontextualization of work tasks might exacerbate burnout. + How many companies are actually defined by great design these days (versus, say, great functionality)? Not even Apple seems to care about that anymore, as they seem eager outpace their software with their hardware, rather than creating any iconic or lasting designs. As “product design” has evolved to include software products, the discipline and its output have become just as mutable, and therefor disposable, and therefor ‘not worth’ the effort necessary to make good things, let alone great things. |