Jekyll2024-03-12T23:08:18-04:00/feed.xmlJordan KoscheiJordan Koschei is a product designer and writer who lives and works in the Hudson Valley.The Value Proposition of Design Systems for a Mature Enterprise2023-08-04T00:00:00-04:002023-08-04T00:00:00-04:00/design-systems-in-mature-enterprises<p>The value that a design system brings to an early-stage product or a small organization is clear, but what about large enterprises with a long history and a myriad of products?</p>
<p>Can the value of a new design system outweigh the challenges of driving adoption and overcoming the status quo?</p>
<p>Let’s explore five key reasons why a design system is invaluable for mature enterprises:</p>
<h2 id="design-systems-drive-consistency">Design systems drive consistency.</h2>
<p>In the world of software, consistency builds trust and enhances usability. A design system fosters cohesion across all products and features, resulting in:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>UI consistency.</strong> Consistent buttons, forms, and other elements create a cohesive interface.</li>
<li><strong>UX consistency.</strong> Shared design patterns and flows enable customers to navigate multiple products effortlessly. New products will feel familiar, and cohesive flows across experiences builds trust and avoids the disjointed feeling of multiple features being duct-taped together.</li>
<li><strong>Future-facing consistency.</strong> Updates can be easily propagated across the organization, reducing adoption hurdles and allowing design improvements without disrupting work.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="design-systems-increase-velocity">Design systems increase velocity.</h2>
<p>Designers and engineers can work more efficiently by leveraging a common set of design elements to compose complex solutions. This accelerates progress by increasing:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Design velocity.</strong> Designers can focus on solving unique problems rather than rethinking standard elements like buttons.</li>
<li><strong>Engineering velocity.</strong> Engineers can leverage existing UI components, saving time and effort.</li>
<li><strong>Product velocity.</strong> Product Managers can concentrate on delivering value instead of tackling common UI/UX challenges.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="design-systems-enable-builders-to-focus-on-their-product-areas">Design systems enable builders to focus on their product areas.</h2>
<p>When announcing the launch of AWS, Jeff Bezos famously said: “Focus on the things that make your beer taste better.” Just as it’s a distraction for a brewery to build its own power plant rather than getting electricity from the grid, any organization should be concerned with the things that impact their core offerings and outsource or abstract out the things that don’t.</p>
<p>To borrow a phrase from the launch of AWS, “Focus on the things that make your beer taste better.”</p>
<p>Just as a brewery shouldn’t be building its own power plant, an organization should concentrate on what impacts its core offerings and abstract out the rest. Design systems facilitate this by:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Reducing redundant work.</strong> Every software product ever shipped has needed an opinion on what a button or a text field looks like. Standard design and engineering elements are handled centrally, freeing teams to address new challenges.</li>
<li><strong>Unlocking core excellence</strong> By delegating routine tasks, teams can excel in their primary domains rather than re-solving solved problems.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="design-systems-ensure-best-practices-are-built-in">Design systems ensure best practices are built in.</h2>
<p>Instead of burdening each feature team with ensuring cross-browser compatibility, accessibility, internationalization, and more, a design system can embed best practices in a single library and disseminate them to all users of the system:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Cross-browser compatibility.</strong> Components can be built to align with the organization’s browser support commitments, relieving feature teams from managing this aspect individually.</li>
<li><strong>Semantics & accessibility.</strong> Components can be built to generate semantic HTML, appropriate ARIA tags, WCAG-compliant styles, and other accessibility features.</li>
<li><strong>Tokens and standard values.</strong> Components can include tokens/variables to ensure that feature teams aren’t unintentionally building magic values into the product.</li>
<li><strong>Internationalization and other cross-team initiatives.</strong> Components can include RTL styles, boilerplate code for translation libraries, and other cross-team concerns.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="design-systems-reduce-costs">Design systems reduce costs.</h2>
<p>The upshot is that <strong>design systems reduce costs</strong>.</p>
<p>Organizations can do more with fewer people, freeing up designers and engineers to focus on new features and improvements that move the bottom line.</p>
<p>As products become more consistent and usable, user trust and customer satisfaction will increase.</p>
<p>Additionally, the initial investment in a design system will amortize across the saved design and engineering hours across many teams.</p>
<h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2>
<p>Design systems are not just for young companies and new products; they are essential tools for mature enterprises seeking to maintain their competitive edge and drive innovation.</p>
<p>Design systems drive consistency, velocity, and quality, and they reduce costs and build customer trust.</p>The value that a design system brings to an early-stage product or a small organization is clear, but what about large enterprises with a long history and a myriad of products?Lowering Your Standards vs. Picking Your Battles2020-05-26T00:00:00-04:002020-05-26T00:00:00-04:00/lowering-your-standards-vs-picking-your-battles<p>There’s too much work to do, and too little time. Too few designers. Too little energy.</p>
<p>Odds are, you can’t singlehandedly design every interface, flow, social post, landing page, icon, illustration, logo, and whatever else your project needs. No matter how large your team, there will always be some things that are higher priority and some that are lower.</p>
<p>At some point, we have to triage the things that are worth our attention and the things we choose to punt on.</p>
<p>I know that feeling — it feels like a failure, consigning some of our output to being lesser quality than the rest. It feels like we’re lowering our standards, surrendering to the inevitable entropy that comes when we don’t polish everything to the same degree of perfection.</p>
<p>This is a dangerous lie. Picking our battles is not the same thing as lowering our standards.</p>
<p>Go ahead, use Canva for those social posts. Build those landing pages using Squarespace. If it frees you up for more impactful work, that’s a good thing.</p>
<p>But how do we decide which battles to pick? There are a few things we can look for:</p>
<p>What has the biggest immediate impact on revenue (or other organizational goals)? What project will gain the most if it’s well-designed, or lose the most if it’s poorly-designed? That’s a helpful rubric for prioritization.</p>
<p>What will have the greatest long-term effect? Is there a project that’ll have major design implications in a month? Six months? A year? One-off projects tend to have less impact than projects with recurring value — ie, a single social graphic looking crappy isn’t as big a deal as a social graphic template looking crappy.</p>
<p>What will have second-order effects? Some projects affect other projects which affect other projects, and the ramifications of good/bad design will cascade to those other areas of your purview. You could be doing Future You a favor by investing resources, or digging Future You a hole of design debt that they’ll sorely regret.</p>
<p>What will impact design’s ability to have future impact? Which projects will generate the most political capital for capital-D “Design” at your organization if you invest resources in them? Which projects would destroy the least political capital if you choose not to invest resources? That could impact your ability to pick your battles successfully in the future.</p>
<p>It’s okay to invest design resources into some projects more than others. Making those decisions are themselves a form of design. It’s a tough pill to swallow sometimes, but it’s part of the job.</p>There’s too much work to do, and too little time. Too few designers. Too little energy.One-Way Doors2020-04-28T00:00:00-04:002020-04-28T00:00:00-04:00/one-way-doors<p>Some decisions are easily reversible; others are one-way doors.</p>
<p>I prefer the former. There’s comfort in having a safety net. I like to be able to say, “I think this idea will work, but if it doesn’t, we can always roll it back.”</p>
<p>One-way doors are risky, but sometimes they’re necessary. (There’s a reason why “no risk, no reward” is a cliché. It’s true!)</p>
<h2 id="reasons-why-a-decision-might-be-a-one-way-door">Reasons why a decision might be a one-way door:</h2>
<p><strong>Engineering challenges.</strong> Sometimes there may be technical challenges that make it difficult to revert a decision. If you show a design concept to an engineer and they say, “Okay, we’ll have to change the database structure a bit,” then you might have a one-way door.</p>
<p><strong>Major design changes.</strong> Completely changing a particular flow, or significantly changing a layout, can be a one-way door. Even if there isn’t a technical reason why you can’t roll back the change, you run the risk of disorienting users or making them feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under them. Which leads to…</p>
<p><strong>User trust.</strong> Making changes too quickly, or making big changes and then backtracking, can make a product feel unstable. Imagine a finance app, or a health app, or something else where stability is critical; making a major change and then reverting it could be catastrophic to the perception of the product.</p>
<h2 id="types-of-decisions-that-could-be-a-one-way-door">Types of decisions that could be a one-way door:</h2>
<p><strong>Changing a permissions model.</strong> It’s much easier to start with strict permissions and then open them up, than open permissions that are gradually locked down. If you have a feature that only admins can use, it feels like a bonus if suddenly regular users can use it too. Conversely, if everyone can use a certain feature, it’s almost impossible to lock it down to just admins without inciting a user revolt.</p>
<p><strong>Launching a feature that changes users’ workflows.</strong> Any time you mess with users’ workflows, you’re playing with fire. Any change that gives users paths to new behaviors is risky to roll back, because users tend to be more loyal to their workflow than to a product. Example: a few months ago we launched a feature at askSpoke that allows users to create views based on saved filters. Now that it’s a popular feature, we couldn’t even consider removing it, since that would damage how our users structure their work.</p>
<p><strong>Features that touch third-party tools.</strong> If your product includes any kind of integrations, it’s almost impossible to remove an integration once it’s been added. It can be done, but with difficulty — Twitter famously locked down its API, killing off much of the third-party ecosystem that was the source of a lot of the platform’s early innovation. The more external touchpoints a product has, the more permanent any related design changes feel.</p>
<h2 id="the-takeaway">The takeaway</h2>
<p>It’s always worth considering whether a design solution might be a one-way door. If it is, that’s fine! We don’t need to avoid one-way doors completely, but instead be cognizant of what they mean for our design and the product as a whole. There may be times when it’s worth going with a suboptimal design solution because it leaves options open, instead of picking the optimal solution that happens to be irreversible.</p>Some decisions are easily reversible; others are one-way doors.Local and Global Maxima2020-04-07T00:00:00-04:002020-04-07T00:00:00-04:00/local-global-maxima<p>When making design decisions, we should stay aware of whether we’re pursuing a local maximum or a global maximum.</p>
<p>Think of a project you’re working on that involves some tricky decisions. Now visualize that project as a mountain, with the summit being the ideal version of that project — the version that best accomplishes the stated goals.</p>
<p>As we tweak our design, we move higher up the mountain. Find a font that performs slightly better than the other choices? Move up. Change some wording in response to an A/B test? Move even higher. Swap some buttons to better suit user data? Move higher still.</p>
<p>Here’s the problem on relying only on data and experiments to make design decisions. Yes, our metrics keep getting better as we optimize our design, but we don’t know if we’re climbing the right mountain. Maybe we’re still in the foothills, and the version that really accomplishes our goals best has a different starting point entirely.</p>
<p>Here’s a terrible drawing I did on my iPad, after discovering that my Apple Pencil is no longer working:</p>
<figure>
<img alt="Local and global maxima" src="/assets/img/writing/local-global-maxima.webp" />
</figure>
<p>I’m not disparaging A/B testing and other statistical techniques — they’re extremely valuable, if we’re confident about the direction we’re going. They help us choose between options that already exist, and so they’re useful for helping us find a version that’s better rather than unearthing the version that’s best. They can help us summit the mountain we already know about, but not find a whole new mountain.</p>
<p>“Now wait,” you may be saying. “Why not test between different directions entirely?”</p>
<p>Yes, that’s true. But it still relies on us having already come up with the options we’re choosing between — it can help us decide, but not create. A real sea change requires the kind of creative leap that’s harder to systematize, and impossible to force with research alone.</p>
<p>But more on that next time.</p>Climbing the right mountain, and the dangers of relying on data alone.Why are design decisions so hard?2020-03-28T00:00:00-04:002020-03-28T00:00:00-04:00/why-are-design-decisions-so-hard<p>The blank screen is intimidating. Without the constraints inherent in designing for the physical world, we’re restricted only by what the browser or OS can render.</p>
<p>This is exhilarating, but also kind of scary. With infinite potential solutions to any problem, how do we choose the right one? Is there one true “right one?”</p>
<p>There are lots of reasons why design decisions can be difficult. For one thing, they’re often ambiguous — after all, if there were a clear right answer, there wouldn’t be much of a decision to make. Here are some other obstacles I find myself struggling with when trying to make product design decisions:</p>
<p><strong>Success is hard to measure.</strong> The success criteria are hard to define, or it’s hard to tie the decision to a particular business goal. Small-seeming decisions are often like this; the placement of a certain button may be very important, but it’s hard to say if left-aligned vs right-aligned will really move the needle on a particular metric.</p>
<p><strong>Feedback loops are too long.</strong> The time between making a decision and finding out if it worked is too long, making it hard to iterate and learn.</p>
<p><strong>The stakes feel high.</strong> It’s easy to feel paralyzed by a decision when it feels like a lot’s riding on it, like when changing a fundamental interaction or introducing a major new layout</p>
<p><strong>There isn’t necessarily a “right answer.”</strong> Design decisions can often feel subjective. Even if there is an objectively best solution for a particular problem, there’s no guarantee you’ll stumble upon it.</p>
<p><strong>Research is inconclusive or impossible.</strong> Your user research may not provide a strong signal on the right direction, or maybe it’s impossible or impractical to collect research on a particular question. You may feel like you’re flying blind.</p>
<p>Overcoming these obstacles is why I’ve become fascinated by the decision-making process, the mental models that effective designers use, and the various ways designers cut through the ambiguity to design truly great products.</p>
<p>In the coming weeks I’ll start writing about those mental models, along with case studies about decision-making in the wild, interviews with designers about their process, and findings from my own reading on the subject.</p>
<p>Thanks for following along. Tell your friends!</p>The blank screen is intimidating. Without the constraints inherent in designing for the physical world, we’re restricted only by what the browser or OS can render.Creative Hudson Valley2019-09-02T00:00:00-04:002019-09-02T00:00:00-04:00/creative-hudson-valley<figure>
<img alt="Creative Hudson Valley homepage" src="/assets/img/writing/creative-hudson-valley.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>I’ve started a publication called <a href="https://creativehudsonvalley.com"><strong>Creative Hudson Valley</strong></a> that features interviews with interesting people doing interesting work in the Hudson Valley.</p>
<p>In the words of the site’s About page:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Creative Hudson Valley is an online publication featuring interviews with creative people of all stripes, living and working in the Hudson Valley.</p>
<p>It’s a love letter to the incredible dynamism of the Hudson Valley creative scene. We’ll celebrate artists and designers, filmmakers and musicians, chefs and brewers, entrepreneurs and community leaders. We’ll cover people doing the best work of their lives in Ulster, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, and beyond. We’ll feature creatives at every level of recognition, from big names to local icons to the artisan next door.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Check it out <a href="https://creativehudsonvalley.com">here</a>.</p>Choosing Boredom2019-05-01T00:00:00-04:002019-05-01T00:00:00-04:00/i-want-to-be-bored<p>I want to be the person on the train who notices things and remembers faces and wasn’t glued to his phone the whole time.</p>
<p>I want to be present, even in the liminal moments throughout the day. Waiting in line, waiting for my coffee,
waiting for the page to load.</p>
<p>I want to feel embodied as I walk my dog. I want to hear birds and feel sunshine and feel like part of the environment,
rather than being stuck in my headphones.</p>
<p>I don’t want my day to be subdivided into podcast episodes.</p>
<p>I don’t want to find myself thinking in tweets.</p>
<p>I don’t want the most memorable parts of my day to be something I saw on a screen.</p>
<p>I can’t remember most of this stuff afterwards anyway.</p>
<!-- I don't want to be someone who laughs at memes and things I saw on Instagram. Memes aren't funny unless you spend a substantial chunk of the day looking at memes. In high school, nobody wanted to be "the guy who was into internet humor." Now the whole world is into internet humor. Now every other story starts with "I read this thing on Buzzfeed..." or "I watched this video on Youtube..." or "I saw this thing on Twitter..." -->
<p>There used to be so much more space to be bored, to be alone with my thoughts. The internet was someplace you went deliberately, not an ambient part of the environment. My hand didn’t twitch towards my phone if I forgot the name of an actor or something. I didn’t feel the need to check my email while pooping. My hand didn’t compulsively reach for my phone, because I wasn’t afraid of being alone with my thoughts for more than 30 seconds.</p>
<!-- I felt more creative back then. -->
<p>The web is built around hyperlinks, and yet I was so much better at making connections between disparate ideas before I carried the whole internet around in my pocket. Maybe having those connections constantly, instantly available has made my brain offload that function, just as it’s made me offload my memory. I’m 29, but I can’t remember things like I used to.</p>
<p>I’m scared of being remade in the image of the devices I carry.</p>
<p>Time feels disjointed to me now, smeared across the devices and websites and the services in which I’ve fragmented my identity.</p>
<p>The valuable things in life come with lots of friction. They take work and the capacity for deep, deliberate, concentrated focus. If we lose the ability for that, how can we muse? Savor? Pray? How can we Be, rather than Do?</p>
<p>Meditating using a smartphone app is like hosting an AA meeting at a bar.</p>
<!-- We've turned everything into apps. I don't mean that there's an app for everything; I mean that we've decided that everything and anything can be made into a discrete, packaged, sandboxed experience. You can even go to church online now. Talk about retail. -->
<p>Constant stimulation is a drug. The more content we consume, the more content we need to consume to feel satiated. Eventually we find ourselves on a treadmill and the only way our brains feel stimulated is by constantly consuming more and more. We have to check our phones while watching Netflix. We have to flit back and forth between Facebook and Twitter and Instagram while watching Netflix. Even that starts to feel boring. Eventually we’re bored all the time, because the world doesn’t hold enough interest for our gluttinous, addicted brains. The more stimulation we feed ourselves, the more boring everything becomes. Eventually we can’t even be in the world without listening to a podcast or checking the latest on our phones because all of Creation isn’t enough for us.</p>
<p>Sunshine and birdsong may reflect the glory of God, but have you seen this article on Buzzfeed?</p>
<p>I didn’t know what to write after that last sentence, and suddenly I realized I’d opened up Chrome and hit <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">CMD-T</code> and <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">T</code> and return and suddenly I was on Twitter. It was a reflex. I didn’t even know I was doing it.</p>
<p>Slow is good. Boring is good. The more we allow ourselves to be bored — the more we allow ourselves to be alone with our thoughts — the less boring that boredom will seem. The world has infinite stimuli and infinite depth, but we can’t appreciate depth if we’re constantly training ourselves to prefer breadth. We’re skimming when we could be luxuriating. All because our monkey brains crave stimulation and the internet is the world’s greatest <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber">Skinner Box</a>.</p>
<p>I want my brain back.</p>
<p>I want to be bored more.</p>I want to be the person on the train who notices things and remembers faces and wasn’t glued to his phone the whole time.Interview for Interface Lovers2019-04-27T00:00:00-04:002019-04-27T00:00:00-04:00/interface-lovers<figure>
<img alt="Interface Lovers" src="/assets/img/writing/interfacelovers.jpg" />
</figure>
<p><a href="https://interfacelovers.com">Interface Lovers</a> is an online publication that interviews product designers about who they are and what they do. It’s enlightening to hear how other designers got into their roles and learn about how they work, and I was flattered when they reached out to interview me.</p>
<p>I’ve changed jobs since I gave this interview, so a lot has changed, but this will give you some insight into my design philosophy and outlook.</p>
<p><strong>Bonus:</strong> They ask every designer for some music recommendations, so I’m happy to say that
you can now find some sweet worktunes at <a href="https://open.spotify.com/user/interfacelovers/playlist/7KQcFwvMXCvETtmjduegVx?si=QfaNkY3zTcuCWSct7UwKMQ">Designer Mix #140 — Jordan Koschei</a> on Spotify.</p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.Joining Spoke2019-04-13T00:00:00-04:002019-04-13T00:00:00-04:00/joining-spoke<figure>
<img src="/assets/img/writing/spoke-swag.jpg" alt="My Spoke onboarding swag" />
<figcaption>New role = new swag!</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I’ve spent the last two weeks in San Francisco, onboarding at <a href="https://askspoke.com">Spoke</a>,
where I’ve joined as Senior Product Designer.</p>
<p>Spoke is an AI-powered ticketing and knowledge management tool for IT, HR, and any other team
you can think of. Rather than directing your requests to a person, it figures out if it already
knows the answer and surfaces the relevant knowledge. It’s impressively smart, and getting
moreso all the time.</p>
<p>I’ll be continuing to work remotely from the Hudson Valley, traveling to the SF office a few
times a year. It’s not a bad place to spend some time:</p>
<figure class="image">
<img src="/assets/img/writing/spoke-roof.jpg" alt="The view from Spoke's rooftop" />
<figcaption>The view from the roof.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="/assets/img/writing/spoke-office.jpg" alt="The Spoke office" />
<figcaption>I got in early one day and thought I'd take a picture of the office.</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="/assets/img/writing/spoke-kitchen.jpg" alt="Spoke's office kitchen" />
</figure>
<figure>
<img src="/assets/img/writing/spoke-dog.jpg" alt="Spoke's office dog" />
</figure>
<p>More to come!</p>New role = new swag!Interview for User League2019-03-11T00:00:00-04:002019-03-11T00:00:00-04:00/user-league<figure>
<img alt="User League" src="/assets/img/writing/userleague.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>I was interviewed for User League, a new online publication from <a href="https://twitter.com/itsdavemartin">Dave Martin</a>, principal designer at <a href="https://automattic.com/">Automattic</a>.</p>
<p>This quote sums up what I believe about design:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I like to think of design as a form of hospitality — we’re creating digital environments in which our users will live for a time. Those environments should make our users feel comfortable and confident, and enable them to do things they couldn’t otherwise do. <strong>A good product gives the user superpowers</strong> without drawing too much attention to itself. It’s better to leave the user thinking, “Hey, I’m awesome” than “Hey, that product’s awesome.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thanks, Dave! Head over to User League to read the <a href="https://userleague.com/jordan-koschei/">full interview</a>.</p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.