Made by humans
I’d like to jot down some things I’ve learned over the course of the year as a work newbie. Here’s #3:
3. Don’t underestimate the resources it takes to create the most basic product
Based on my decades-old experience as a consumer, objects simply existed out of the blue.
To elaborate, plastic Happy Meal figurines from McDonald’s originated from the paper bag behind the store counter,
meat at the grocery store came from styrofoam dishes wrapped in Saran Wrap, and
Wonder bread came from a white bag printed with colorful balloons.
As for web sites like Google and Yahoo!, the screens simply existed on my monitor.
And these pages were available within milliseconds of a request.
One of the big discoveries that I made at work was that actual human beings made these digital layouts and pages.
Duh.
Of course, I don’t think I really really believed that these web products existed without human’s creating them. But, I just wasn’t able to imagine the extent to which each pixel and column width is scrutinized and thought over by people poring over their monitors and printouts.
There must be a physical law that proves that things take a tedious amount of time to prepare, and a miniscule amount to devour or consume. If there isn’t, I think I can create one for the product industry.
A typical day of the illustrator guy in my team includes zooming into a 24X4-pixel icon by 2000% and adjusting the opacity of each 1X1 pixel square.
Once, I had a friend call and ask for 100 icon illustrations within the next two days, or sooner, if possible. What experience teaches, is the ability to determine that this request is insane. Experience also grants the confidence to be able to tell that friend, “no. Let’s look into what you’re really asking for.” From a binary mindset, to answer the question, “can it be done, or can’t it?” — one would answer “of course it can be done”. From a design point of view, which requires a qualitative assessment of the work needed, the answer is that “it can’t be done well enough to be worth showing to users. Let’s schedule this properly.”
As part of the design program at Stanford, my class took some contact improv lessons from a dance instructor. He described the body as a filter – the mind runs faster than the body can. And, the limitations of the body filters our thoughts into things that are physically doable. I think of the role of designers is like the body. We filter the sprawling ideas of product managers and ourselves, in order to create tangible things. And while there is a magical part to seeing something materialize, project team members need to be informed that this magic is actually done by humans, and that it takes time.
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Tags: design, project management, scheduling, user experience design
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