I almost got someone fired because of design
When I was 15, my father was a horticultural engineer at a plant-production company in the south of Europe. When school broke out, he got me a summer job where he worked. For the first 2 weeks, I was pruning flowers under the burning sun. The 3 remaining weeks, I had the opportunity to replace an office employee who was on vacation.
For this office job, the task was to print weekly worksheets for the production teams. My dad had moved the production information to an Access database; but preparing the worksheets was still rather complex. I had to export all the data to Excel, do some merging and unmerging, format for printing, print, control and fix the inevitable errors. The whole process took 3 days.
I did it the first week, but…
I’m a lazy person. I hate repetitive and boring tasks. I’m always trying to find ways to automate them.
Around that time, I had started doing some designing and programming in Basic, the same language Access used. So I decided to attempt creating a better solution. I struggled; but in the end, I somehow managed.
The following week, I came to the office, switched on the computer, clicked on a button and left to grab a coffee. A long coffee… As two hundred sheets were being printed. One employee even came up to me saying there was a problem with the printer: it wouldn’t stop printing. Monday at 10:30 all worksheets were ready to be distributed to the teams, with no errors.
When the company boss found out about this, he congratulated me. I had saved precious time for the company. Before this, some teams only got their worksheets on Wednesday afternoon. The fact everyone got their worksheets at the same time made the organization run more smoothly.
When the employee I was replacing came back, I showed her how to use the new system. It was just a window with a prefilled week number and a button marked “Print worksheets.” At first, she was amazed (and I was proud of myself). But then, she started wondering what she would do from Monday afternoon to Wednesday. Had she become redundant? In the following days I remember my dad telling my mother that they were not sure what this employee would do from now on. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time… And fortunately she was relocated to another department.
I was nonchalant then, but…
When I started working as a product designer I was sometimes scared of the power of design. A power that could lead to people losing their jobs. With time and experience, I realized that design often has the opposite effect. I see this every day at Central, the digital design studio I founded.
As we help clients optimise products and processes, we help employees focus on what really matters, and help their company grow. For example, when we make clients’ products easier to use, they have to provide less support for end-users. Instead of helping customers fix issues linked to poor design, they can spend time showing customers how to get the most out of their product. It makes customers happy, and they return again and again.
Another positive effect of good design is that it often creates employment. Though it can sometimes replace human workers, design helps companies grow steadily by improving their products and generating revenue faster. We’ve noticed that the work done by 1 of our designers usually provides work for up to 5 developers in our client’s team. Most of the time, when we start working with a client, their revenue increases and they recruit more collaborators. We’re proud of that.
To be sure, we can’t prevent companies from laying off people due to technological improvements. But we choose our clients carefully. We believe in working with clients who have values that are similar to ours. As Wilson Miner explained in his talk at the Build conference, we must be careful about what we put into the world. That involves thinking about what businesses we support.
Design is a very powerful tool. It can make a process more efficient, it can shape the way we spend our time, and it increase the value of your product. If you’re still wondering how the latter happens, check out this case study we made one winter to explain our process.
Thank you for reading!
Geoffroy Delobel is the founder of Central, a digital design studio in Brussels, that helps startups and large companies improve their sites, apps and other digital products on a weekly basis.
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