Design takes 2

William Simons explains that it takes two to tango and what went wrong with his mobile that took photos of the inside of his pocket.

Behind every successful leader there stands a partner with a headache and behind every successful designer there is someone with a huge amount of commercial and common sense – just like Laurel and Hardy, Butch and Sundance; you can’t have one without the other. Let me explain what I mean. Not too long ago I owned a beautifully compact mobile phone, with large buttons matched for my sausage-like fingers and a large screen to see who you are dialing when drunk. No apps to download, no chat functions, email or surf capability. It worked great as a telephone, looked cool and didn’t pretend to be anything else than a phone– in short the perfect mobile for me. The only thing was that this particular make of telephone had left the design studio, by-passed anyone with a brain and gone straight to market. On average it took 40 photographs of my inside pocket a day and there was a little blue flashing light on it to show you that it was turned on, which was so bright in the bedroom at night I had recurring nightmares about being raided by a SWAT team.
On the web there are many examples of this “one person” design. In one camp, sites with so many bells, whistles, flash movies and voiceovers that make you just want to throw your laptop out of the nearest window. Take a look at this firm of Californian architects or this snowboard manufacturer, what are these guys trying to sell, what should I click on? I’m sorry but can someone tell the bespectacled hipster that designed this, that I do not have a decade to explore your over-designed site to find your telephone number! On the other side of the coin, there are sites designed by people like me – with no sense in what looks good or bad, just take me to the point websites. Look at the way America’s favorite supermarket doesn’t mess around. No “hello and welcome”, no flash introduction – just BANG “what are you going to buy today?” One of Europe’s most popular budget airlines is even more like the equivalent of the school bully. Give me you money and get the hell out of Dodge.
We can even take this one person team idea into PR. Just look at the mess BP have got themselves into. Before the now infamous Senate hearing, their CEO Tony Hayward obviously had someone with an undersized micro-dot’s worth of Senate experience advising him. He stuck to that advice rigidly; however the advisor obviously did not have time to get to the part where he told Hayward “if you keep stonewalling them you will look like a twat”. Cue the most newsworthy sound bites just falling into TV’s execs laps.
Design is a partnership, not just of form and function but of form and money – meaning that design briefs should always have dollar bills as their first point. Sure you can dress “money making” up with fancy terms – “we want to drive traffic to our site” = more visitors means more revenue, “we want to reposition ourselves” = a higher class of customers pay more money and “we want to show the uniqueness of our product” = we can charge extra for it if you think it is special. If only the company that had manufactured my mobile could have read this, but then again if all designers read this, we wouldn’t have Italian sports cars, Concorde and other form over function items to be inspired by.