“The alternative to good design is always bad design. There is no such thing as no design.”

—Adam Judge

What is “bad” design? Compared to “design” and “good design,” we don’t talk much about what makes design “bad.” Sometimes, it is because someone was very intentional about a bunch of decisions and just made bad ones, but I don’t think that is the norm. My perception is that most bad design comes from a lack of intention. That may be simply failing to consider a use case, or it may be because production issues are allowed to dictate the user experience, or the business case just doesn’t support doing a good job. It doesn’t really matter why. In my experience, bad design is not the result of making bad design decisions nearly as often as it is the result of not making good design decisions.

Think about your own experiences with bad design, especially bad UX design, and ask yourself:

1. Does it feel like they made it bad on purpose to discourage you?
2. Does it feel like they added your use case to a system that was intended for something much simpler as an afterthought?
3. Does it feel like they made it harder by forcing it to fit a model they already created for another use?
4. Does it feel like they just never anticipated someone would try to do what you need to do?
5. Does it feel like they just misunderstood what people need from their product/experience?

These are the situations that make me think something is badly designed, and all but one of them is a failure of intention (and the other one is intentionally bad). This is part of why my definition of design and “good” design (intent and the extent to which it is applied to decisions that will affect the user experience) works for me. The experiences that make me think “this is bad design” tend to also be the ones that feel thoughtless, like someone didn’t consider the implications of the decisions they made on the user. It’s far more rare that it feels like they did consider it and decided to be a pain in the ass on purpose.

That’s why this quote resonates with me. Design doesn’t exist on a spectrum that goes from “good” to “bad” with “no” in the middle because “no” and “bad” are the same. It’s like the saying, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” I can’t figure out how to make that work linguistically, but hopefully, you get the idea.

This is a really important idea for designers to understand because there are many things we don’t have control over, so we can either try to optimize the decisions we do have domain over, or we can try to influence as many decisions others make for us as we can. The problem is, there is only so far you can improve the things we do control before the cost of that optimization is higher than the benefit. The only reasonable thing to do is try to influence as many people outside of Design to be intentional about the decisions they make and how they affect the user experience, or convince them to ask you to help them make the decision.

This is what I tell my teams when they ask if they “really need to be in that meeting” with whatever stakeholders don’t think they need to be there yet because they’re “not ready to talk about design yet”:

“Design decisions are being made whether you are there to make them or not.”

By allowing decisions to be made that you know will affect the user experience, without participating or trying to exert influence over it, you are abdicating your responsibility as a designer and practicing bad design. You are not just not going to a meeting, you are choosing to let stakeholders make design decisions for you and without you. You are practicing bad design.