As Indigenous People’s Day is a federal holiday, my Monday was one without client hours. Using the time, I’ve spent the day building my website.
Last week, I co-worked on my first database design. It was eight hours of collaborative focus. I spent the time moving back and forth between documents—referencing the extensive user research, complex processes, and notes—asking questions, connecting the prioritized needs & flow to the raw information in the databases.
For me, it was an exciting experience.
And, if you’re designing software for other humans, and want to get the user’s experience right: database design is a path towards influencing the user’s experience from a very basal level.
Any information has to come from somewhere—for display, for interaction, for dynamic use. That’s where databases come in.
Structural sensemaking
Design, as a Craft, is an ambiguous concept that can be applied to almost any discipiline. From organizational design, to software design, mechanical design, interior design—the list is endless. Each one has it’s own flavor of form versus function and strong opinions on which takes greater priority.
I frame design as a way of structural sensemaking.
It’s the aspect and moment of The Process™ that I thrive in. Asking questions to figure out how things are connected, how they influence other, then wanting to throw a chaos monkey1 in just to see what happens.
It’s also one of the reasons why an unlimited blank canvas is difficult to design for: without purpose where does the structure start to reveal itself? Sure, I can design lots of boxes on a page, put them next to each other, and say, “when clicking this, that goes there” but it can be vastly off-base because its not grounded in the structures holding it together.
It starts with purpose & content
I remember one annual meeting, Nekeia Boone presented about the importance of the words on the screen—the content—of Booking.com. It’s one of those talks that stays with you becuase of how it fundamentally shifts one’s approach to their work.
This was one of those moments that shifted my perspective from a “core designer” to “senior designer” in some aspects: the interconnectedness of every role to get software delivered to your screen.
In it, she highlighted the vast impact copy experimentations had on Booking.com. Regularly, daily, thousands of A/B and multivariate tests are being run to refine and hone the words on the platform. Thousands. These changes, while they could be “minor” from a character-count perspective would dependably have far more impact than most anything I would spend days or weeks designing.
The climax of her story was when she removed all the words from the website.
[A screenshot of Booking.com's homepage with all the words on the page]
[A screenshot of Booking.com's homepage with no words on the page, just loads of blank spaces, shapes, colors, and containers]
Surprise!
It doesn’t work.
Without the content and the words driving the whole purpose of how one is supposed to interact and use the tool…it becomes unusable.
Building my website from scratch
Over and over, I’ve been building and rebuilding my website. Since I first learned how to code HTML & CSS in a text document, with my handy-dandy CSS for Dummies ~2007 edition, it’s been a recurring thing.
This past year, I’ve done it four or five times.
One of the stalling factors that keeps tripping me up is, “well, what do I design?” One of the challenges of bottom-up thinking and having the details worked out before moving forward and just throwing something on screen.
Today, I took a step forward after a reframing of my challenge struck in the come-down from the eight-hour database design day.
I took the step back and started from a content perspective.
Content architecture defines the site’s management system, defining the information available to display; and, eventually—design.