Designers should know this! The days of "can you make the logo bigger" and "can you make it pop?" are not so far behind us. Stakeholders overrule design taste with their whims all the time. Now they have a robot designer that never says "no" and churns out shit instantly. What they always wanted.
When you roll up and tell them "aha! actually this is BAD" they genuinely don't believe you. To them it looks fine. Acceptable. Good enough. For this argument to stick, you first have to either make stakeholders care about design in general, or about your opinion personally.
We tried to make orgs care about Design for over a decade. Design Thinking was the original AI — hyped up to solve all problems for ever and 10x your returns. Where is Design Thinking now? Dead. In the end, no one cared. Whatever influence design had gained proved to be fleeting.
The only option left is to earn personal trust with stakeholders. Establish a reputation of someone with good judgment and effective track record, rather than a gatekeeper, and they'll be coming *to you* to ask if their shitty AI-gen dashboard is good (it won't be, don't worry).
I've written on this topic before in my weekly newsletter (it's good, you should subscribe to it)
Again: if you think I am just making up a guy to be mad at, think again (via www.linkedin.com/posts/kara-m...)
They misspelled "Hi"
Not even an "I'm sorry for wasting your time."
Really enjoyed this article - possibly because it rings so (sadly) true from my time down in the product/marketing/UX mines.
One thing I've come to believe — something I'd rather not believe — is that great design doesn't matter that much when it comes to the things that most orgs care about. Functional design? Absolutely. Good design? Probably. But the floor for "acceptably functional" is lower than I wish it was.
The bar for "acceptable" has been set at "we shipped" — and the people who bear the most responsibility are the design leaders who saw giving in to this garbage framing as their pathway to senior titles and large fiefdoms. But when the only goal is "it exists" then taste is no longer a value-add.
Unless of course clients start complaining about lousy products
One of the biggest reasons that companies not only fail to establish effective feedback loops but *actively resist doing so* is because managers don't want to know that the products are lousy.
2. AMC is only NOW considering decreasing ad times after YEARS of complaints because it's affected ticket sales. I mean I know I prefer other independent theatre
And then they wonder why sales flag..
One reply I've heard too often is, "But can you PROVE this isn't good enough??"