You must have heard this quote before. This gets thrown around in Design discussions in the different forums whether in blog sites, design Twitter, or Instagram carousels.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
– Steve Jobs
Today I get to use that phrase while discussing with a colleague some of the sections of our website. She just joined the company and joined our product team. She’s got fresh eyes and was eager to learn and to point out also what she saw in our website.
While discussing the functionalities of our site, plus the colors, fonts etc, we got into the “design” as in the Visual part.
She noticed something was off with the visual representation of one of our modules.
We were supposed to color-code each section on a particular module, but we only color-coded one part and not all. So the training that the user is supposed to be getting isn’t there.
So in simple terms, how it looks does not make sense because some key functionality was broken.
I thank her for pointing it out once again. It is so easy to miss these nuances especially when you are working on a huge project in a huge team.
I am hoping that we get to have a Sprint week to tackle such broken items and fix them once and for all. 🙂