—Steve jobs
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Yeah, I know. A Steve Jobs quote. When you’re done rolling your eyes so far that you can’t use them to read, come on back.
This quote can be interpreted in two completely valid ways, one of which is the way Jobs intended it, and the other is a rare but necessary understanding of how human brains work and the nature of objective reality.
1. What Steve probably meant
That quote is frequently taken out of context and misquoted a bit for the sake of brevity and clarity. The actual quote is this:
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. ”People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
New York Times Magazine, The Guts of a New Machine
What he’s saying is directly related to my previous entry about intentionality and design, and how the measure of the quality of a design is how many decisions are left to chance. He’s saying that design is not just the form of the part the users touch. Design is the intentional decision-making about what the thing is, including engineering. What it does, how it works, and every decision we make that influences how the user will feel about it is design. While most companies work from the technology to the customer experience, Steve tells us multiple times that he believes that’s backward. He also famously said:
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology then try to figure out where to sell it.”
Steve Jobs
And, yet, that is how most technology products come to be. At least in my experience, it tends to be “I can make this cool thing, let’s figure out how to sell it” or “Someone said they’d buy this thing from me, let’s figure out how to make it.” It’s almost never “I want the customer to have this experience within the context of their life, how might we build it, and how much do we think it’s worth to people?” This is a discussion for another post, but it’s wild to me that the result of Apple’s approach is technology products people will buy just because they’re cool, when the result of creating products because the technology is cool fails over and over.
2. Subjective Reality
The other way to interpret this quote is that there is no such thing as objective reality, and all the user is ever capable of knowing about the product is what they perceive by observing it. In that way, the designed experience is quite literally HOW it works. All technology products are a black box to a large extent, and the only thing users know about how they work is what we show and tell them, as is demonstrated in Marc Hassenzahl’s Hedonic/Pragmatic UX Model.
I like this model because it explains one of the central conflicts of UX: the difference between the creator’s Conceptual Model (how we think it works because we conceived it) and the user’s Mental Model (how they think it works based on what they can observe). Rationalizing the differences between these two understandings of the product is often the key to creating a usable experience. We can choose to make it easier for the user to understand what the creator intended, or we can decide to make the product work more like the way the user thinks it should and, in doing so, make the models more alike. Or, we can choose to make it completely unnecessary for the user to understand anything about how it works at all.
What the Hedonic/Pragmatic model asserts is that there are parts of the system that both users and designers can never know, because they don’t have direct access to them. The user can never actually know how the experience works, because they don’t have access to the underlying building blocks of the system or the designers’ intent. Designers, on the other hand, cannot actually know (or design) the user’s experience, not only because they only exist in the user’s mind, but because the user’s perception is a consequence of their situation.
Steve accidentally hit the nail on the head from an existentialist philosophical point of view. To the user, Design is how the product works because design is the only part that exists.