Peter Merholz, “'Product designers' and design team evolution," peterme.com, 31 Oct 2012, www.peterme.com/2012/10/31/product-designers-and-design-team-evolution/.
01 January 2013
We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.
With the rise of the product designer, there’s a simultaneous progression and regression in digital experiences. Using Jesse’s 12-year-old diagram (!) as a framework, we’re seeing the top two planes getting tastier and more interesting — look at Path, Square, AirBNB. Luscious full-bleed high-design screens where it’s clear that designers obsessed over every pixel and element of movement. But in that middle plane, digital experiences suffer from a lack of attention to flows, taxonomies, relationships between content areas, etc. (Any attempt to navigate Path turns into a trip down the rabbit hole.) We’ve forsaken managing complexity in favor of delight in the moment.
