The Adaptive Path weblog has a story from a few days ago on an interview Jeff Veen did with Irene Au, the director of User Experience at Google. It is an interesting interview to read if you’re interested in how User Experience plays a role at Google, but it was one of Veen’s comments that grabbed my attention:

One of the things I’ve noticed, now [that] I’ve had a small team that was working in the start-up environment (…). And then coming into Google, (…) it’s been a little bit of a shift. Like having designers involved from the very beginning, at the technology-creation stage, has been something that the engineers we’re working with have never experienced before. (…) I think that’s a unique opportunity that I’ve found here at Google that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Jeff highlights something I think about frequently and wrote about here - how most companies ignore design until late in the product development process, usually resulting in poorer products. In fact, there doesnt’t seem to be a lot of companies working on the web willing to include design (maybe a proper definition of design is in order) in the early stages of planning.

The truth is that design at the early stage of a product helps everyone get on the same page as to what users will actually want to get out of the product and how to get there - usually resulting in better prioritization and better focus. This need for design justifies how we (here at Webreakstuff) generally start a design project by going back to understanding user goals and how those correlate to what’s actually been built by the development teams. Usually, disappointment ensues.

Fixing product development processes isn’t a difficult task if there’s the courage to pause, step back and think about these simple points:

• What does the user get out of our product?
• How does he do it?
• What do we get out of it?
• How can we combine user goals and business goals?
• Where are we now, and how does that compare to our goals?
• How does the user actually experience our product?

Usually companies believe design is the top layer of a product, and it isn’t. Products shouldn’t be built exclusively through code and embellished with “fancy graphics” (which is how most people still see design). Design, applied to web applications, is the realization of user goals and planning of how the system looks, feels and behaves. You usually can’t fix how something behaves after it’s been entrenched in the application. You need to design (read: plan) ahead.

Related Link: Web design agency services can help optimize the user experience on your website. The usability of your web design is critical.