Web Design is More Than Just the Pretty Sh*t

TLDR: You don’t build a house without a blueprint.

Having worked in-house and in agency life, one thing you start to notice is that nobody has the same definition of “design.” With an in-house gig, design was a luxury we didn’t devote resources to. The final product didn’t have to be pretty, just functional. The consumers told us what they wanted, and the features were added to the product—verbatim. Flip that coin to agency life, and you get the exact opposite dynamic. Design has its own phase and plays a critical aspect in the development of the final products.

Given the contradicting views on design, who’s right? Is design a crucial aspect to the completion of a product or is it merely a dismissable luxury irrelevant to the functionality of a product?

Features are important

In a product-driven environment, when you peel away all the layers, the one thing you provide consumers is a set of features that helps them accomplish the task at hand. When choosing a central focus for your team’s resources, the feature set offered to the consumer is the first place to start. Without the features, your app can be the prettiest, most engaging app, but your consumers won’t have a reason to stick around once the pretty sh*t has been explored.

Pretty sh*t is important

One of the first things that get’s tossed out the door in the hustle to push a product across the line is the pretty sh*t. The mindset tends to be “as long as it works, nobody cares if it’s ugly.” While this mindset is easy to slip into on a tight deadline, producing ugly, functional products can quickly become a critical downfall.

In a product-driven environment, the product essentially becomes an analogy for how to solve a specific problem. If your product doesn’t provide that solution in a meaningful manner, your consumers aren’t going to waste time trying to figure it out, they’re going to move on to another solution. The pretty sh*t is the part that keeps consumers coming back and keeps them engaged with your product.

That being said, web design is more than just the pretty sh*it.

What is design?

Given the feature set and the pretty sh*t are both crucial to the success of a product, where does design fall and how is it utilized to create engaging experiences that solve real-world problems for your customers? Design actually sits at an intersection between these two sections. It acts as a transit that keeps all the pieces moving in the right direction. Whether planning the traffic flow of a retail store or architecting the layout and user flow of a website, design really just becomes the plan of execution.

Being meaningful about design just means being mindful of what you’re actually providing to your consumers. Design can be the difference in solving your user’s problems and just offering functional or pretty sh*t. The latter works, but you’ll get far more engagement finding a balance between the two.

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Updated: Apr 13, 2022