How Design Makes the World” by Scott Berkun Reflection Paper In “How Design Makes the World”, Scott Berkun sheds light on the value and impact of carefully planned design in every object, digital interface, architecture, and system that surrounds us. More than just style or functionality, well-thought-out design can bring more clarity, simplicity, safety, elegance, and satisfaction to the way we use services and products every day. Meanwhile, poor design can be frustrating and ultimately have detrimental consequences in individual lives and the future of businesses. Berkun argues that one of the main causes of poor design is not asking the right questions and overlooking the user testing stage. Therefore, his advice to avoid design failure is to focus on the user and incite the whole team to reflect upon who the product is being designed for and who is being excluded. Often, the group of professionals that makes decisions regarding the product design is not the target market nor have they thoroughly considered user sentiment when launching the product. Another interesting observation made by Berkun is that what is intuitive for some is not intuitive for everyone. It is common to hear the words “intuitive” and “innovative” when designing a new product, however, these perceptions vary according to one’s interest, experience, background, geographical area, and socioeconomic status. According to Berkun, “without focusing on the customer or user, there is ample opportunity for conflicting goals and suboptimal results”. Good designers rely on observational psychology and usability studies to learn how users interact and feel about a product, service, or system. They know that before improving something for someone you need to care about how people experience your product. Still, many decision makers are unaware of the impact of bad design and downplay usability studies or designers’ assessments, being left to unconscious incompetence. Sometimes these decision makers are just not willing to commit to good design by hiring skilled designers or spending more time and money on a project, taking a dangerous shortcut. At the end, there is a mismatch between user goals and business goals. This book supports what I have learned about design-thinking in this class. Understanding who the design is for, empathizing with the user, prototyping, and testing are stages of the design-thinking process and have a strong relationship with Scott Berkun’s case for incorporating a user-centric approach when designing products, services, or systems. Engineering a solution to a problem without taking into consideration human behavior and perception can lead to failure. As a marketing manager, I observed that the user-centric approach is not exclusive to the realm of design, as it is also applicable to marketing. If marketing was once seen as an area of expertise to help make business offers more compelling, currently marketers are driven to fully understand their target audiences and find ways to resonate with them while they promote products and services. The most important message of this book to me is to resist time and money constraints and take the adequate time to study user sentiment when launching a new product, like a website or a social media campaign. Although this step is proven to be extremely important, many managers find difficulty in getting budget and support to get user feedback. At the same time, there are creative ways of getting around these obstacles, for example by developing a feedback campaign with incentives before product launch. Another takeaway is to have these four questions in mind when designing a solution for a problem: “What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for? How do you ensure you are successful? And who might be hurt by your work, now or in the future?”. I can relate to Berkun’s point that these questions are frequently neglected in new product meetings. “How Design Makes the World” is a must-read for anyone involved in designing products or services or those who would like to learn more about how design impacts people’s lives. The book has given me insights and tools to critically evaluate design and strive to make the projects I work on better designed for my target audience.
