Design is a spectrum, not a binary

If design is simply the rendering of intent, and if therefore anyone who possesses intent and can render something is a designer, then one must ask the question: is there any product or service, software or otherwise, that isn’t designed? In my opinion, no, everything is designed. (I’ll pause here to note that that I’m far from the first person to arrive at this conclusion.) I’ve worked with countless teams over the years who explain, as we embark on a redesign, that the first version “wasn’t really designed, it was just built by engineers.” I bristle at that. The engineers had intent! They rendered things! They decided they need a way to navigate their tool. And then decided what items to put in the left nav, and that it should be a left non-collapsible pane instead of a fixed top navigation bar. They decided on radio buttons over a drop-down. They decided that links should be pink and buttons green and they felt that they really nailed it. They made design choices, even if they didn’t think of them as such. If they hadn’t we’d be working on the v0, not the v1.

When I have these conversations, the question we circle around isn’t “was it designed?”. It’s “was it designed well?” And in many cases, no. But when the design is poor, it’s usually because the developer lacked the technical knowledge of information architecture (a sub-discipline of UX design) or interface design (another sub-discipline) or user experience research and testing (another) or content design or graphic design or motion design (the list goes on), or because they simply didn’t explore multiple potential design options and flex their creativity, not because they didn’t design it.

You might quibble with this. Some systems are so large that no one ever looked at the entirety of it and made decisions that reflect researched, user-focused intent at that altitude. Perhaps this is because the system was too complex for a single person to wrap their brain around. So the divvied up the work, and different teams took different parts, and no one drove a singular perspective. Or in other cases, perhaps pieces of the system were built linearly, features “bolted on,” without much planning for what would come next. In these cases you might argue that smaller features or use cases such as a sign-up flow or a recommendation widget are designed, often well, while the overarching architecture or connected service was not designed at all.

I’d argue that even in these cases, the bit of work a team had to do to connect pieces up post hoc constitutes design, even if minimally. So every piece was designed—the individual components, then the connective tissue. The resulting cobbled-together larger architecture likely served the needs of its users poorly. But it was designed, just poorly. Some of the individual pieces likely served the needs of their users well. So those were designed, and they were better. It’s all a spectrum.