Decision time
I’ve always associated good design with thoughtfulness. Like, I should be able to point to any element in an interface and the designer should be able to tell me the reasons it’s there. Those reasons may be rooted in user needs or asthetics or some other consideration, but the point is that there’s a justification for it. Justify every pixel!
But I’ve come to realise that this is a bit reductionist. Now when I point at an interface element, I still expect the designer to be able to justify its inclusion, but I’d also like to know the trade-offs that were made.
Suppose there’s a large hero image. I’m sure the designer would have no problem justifying its inclusion on the basis of impact and the emotional heft it delivers. But did they also understand the potential downsides? Were they aware of the performance implications of including a large image?
I hope the answer to both questions is yes. They understood the costs, but they decided that, on balance, the positives outweighed the negatives.
When it comes to the positives, universal principles of design often apply. Colour theory, typography, proximity, and so on. But the downsides tend to be specific to the medium that the design is delivered in.
Let’s say you’re designing for print. You want to include an extra typeface just for footnotes. No problem. There isn’t really a downside. In print, you can use all the typefaces you want. But if this were for the web, then the calculation would be different. Every extra typeface comes with a performance penalty. A decision that might be justified in one medium might not work in another medium.
It works both ways; on the web you can use all the colours you want, without incurring any penalties, but in print—depending on the process you’re using—you might have to weigh up that decision very differently.
From this perspective, every design decision is like a balance sheet. A good web designer understands the benefits and the costs behind each decision they make.
It’s a similar story when it comes to web development. Heck, we even have the term “tech debt” to describe decisions that we know aren’t for the best in the long term.
In fact, I’d say that consideration of the long-term effects is something that should play a bigger part in technical decisions.
When we’re weighing up the pros and cons of using a particular tool, we have a tendency to think in the here and now. How might this help me right now? How might this hinder me right now?
But often a decision that delivers short-term gain may well end up delivering long-term pain.
Alexander Petros describes this succinctly:
Reopen a node repository after 3 months and you’ll find that your project is mired in a flurry of security warnings, backwards-incompatible library “upgrades,” and a frontend framework whose cultural peak was the exact moment you started the project and is now widely considered tech debt.
When I wrote about making the Patterns Day website I described my process as doing it “the long hard stupid way”—a term that Frank coined in a talk he gave a few years back. But perhaps my hands-on approach is only long, hard and stupid in the short time. With each passing year, the codebase will retain a degree of readability and accessibility that I would’ve sacrificed had I depended on automated build processes.
Robin Berjon puts this into the historical perspective of Taylorism and Luddism:
Whenever something is automated, you lose some control over it. Sometimes that loss of control improves your life because exerting control is work, and sometimes it worsens your life because it reduces your autonomy.
Or as Marshall McLuhan put it:
Every extension is also an amputation.
…which is fine as long as the benefits of the extension outweigh the costs of the amputation. My worry is that, when it comes to evaluating technology for building on the web, we aren’t considering the longer-term costs.
Maintenance matters. With the passing of time, maintenance matters more and more.
Maybe we avoid thinking about the long-term costs because it would lead to decision paralysis. That’s understandable. But I take comfort from some words of wisdom on the web from the 1990s. Tim Berners-Lee’s style guide for hypertext:
Because hypertext is potentially unconstrained you are a little daunted. Do not be. You can write a document as simply as you like. In many ways, the simpler the better.