Designs that Fail

On my way to lunch this afternoon I decided to stop and get some donuts. As I drove by the store, however, I noticed that the OPEN sign was dark, the universal indicator that a store is closed. A moment later, however, I happened to glance back at the store and noticed that the light was lit. It was, in fact, blinking, and I had caught it during one of its “off” moments. By the time I realized this, I was already past the store and couldn’t stop.

I make a habit of reading Design Observer because the deeper I get into my role as a designer, the more interested I’ve become not only in website design but design theory, architecture, the design of objects, etc. This week’s article, however, required me to stop and re-read several times before skimming ahead to the comments to see what I had missed. I frankly didn’t understand the writer’s style, or what he was trying to accomplish. Apparently the article is written in the style of “stop motion”, creating a jarring and, for me, nonsensical experience. The article has no flow, no continuity. I managed to read the whole article, but I didn’t enjoy it.

Both of these experiences today gave me pause to consider the failure of design in different contexts: the design of things, and the design of writing.

A blinking OPEN sign is a terrible idea, especially one where the dark segment is so long. The donut shop is on the side of a busy street where no driver has the luxury of watching an OPEN sign. Moreover, nobody wants to watch an OPEN sign. Everyone has been trained to look for the lit OPEN sign; creating a sign that blinks doesn’t attract customers, it confuses them. Design has to consider what a user/client/reader etc. has been trained or conditioned to do, and then help them do it better. A good design shouldn’t require mental (or physical) rewiring. Good design should be intuitive, and in the case of an OPEN sign, understandable in a fraction of a second. I shouldn’t have to think about what a blinking OPEN sign means.

All of this, too, can be applied to writing. Good writing is designed as well, though most writers probably don’t think of what they do as design. The above mentioned article, however, illustrates beautifully the pitfalls of poor design. The article isn’t necessarily badly written, but the execution leaves much to be desired. The expectations of the reader are not met, and worse, the reader can’t adjust to the article’s style because it is too jarring.

I don’t mean to sound as though avant-garde writing or design is undesirable; in fact, I relish an unexpected design that is intuitive and elegant. I also appreciate books that push the envelope: I enjoyed reading House of Leaves, for example, with all its strange postmodern perversities. But writing and design are both vehicles of communication, and when the communication itself gets muddied, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Innovation is wonderful, but we can’t lose sight of the purpose. Design Observer’s latest article fails, in my opinion, to meet the basic criterion of readability. As a result, I failed to engage fully with the article; I failed to do my basic duty as a faithful reader. Design should make any tool easier to use; when I surf away from an article because the way its written makes no sense, or when I by-pass the donut store because its OPEN sign was dark (however briefly) the design has failed.

Just because an OPEN sign can blink doesn’t mean it should.

Just because a writer can write in “stop-motion” definitely doesn’t mean he should.