Is there a limit to perfection? Should we desire perfection all the time? Is it healthy to want perfection, and what do we lose when perfection is the new constant standard in everything we do? When we think about brands that succeed, it’s inevitably polished, successful, complete and perfect products that make up that brand. They’re the gateway to a relationship with the company that makes that product. As consumers, we’re taught to make evaluations on products on how they appear as well as the emotion and brand promise – that the physical dimension of something is tied to the value of that thing, and the physical is our shortcut to finding out what’s perfect, and what’s worth our time in an attention economy – time being as valuable a commodity as cost in an accelerated age. Yes, there’s a bite out of the Apple in the Apple logo, but it’s still a stylized, shiny, perfect apple – and that bite is a nod to Apple’s historical origins as the underdog, the counterculture, the rough and tumble Home Brew pirates, and for the ‘artsy’ among us. Interesting to see how that brand has shifted as it’s become more general consumer audience oriented – that some of the roughness has been lost, and that the Apple brand is more about perfection, for better or worse, and the multicolored apple of the pass is now more glass and grey than it is rough and tumble.
The question is what cost do we pay for that perfection? What are the costs of it – both environmental, as well as cognitively, and psychologically – and should designers be as obsessed with creating perfect experiences with products and services, or should we leave a little dirt on the edges, and where should that dirt live? Our obsession with perfection in everything – designs, people, products, services, the concept of what is perfection itself – can get out of control. I like the cracks where the light floods in, myself – a little imperfection shows us where the humanity lies, and think we crave that connection and imperfection in the human. And in the world of front end digital experiences, tools like Bootstrap and JavaScript libraries have created seamless interactions in a front end user interface – a seamless experience that will carry over into the next generation of gestural based interfaces and connected devices. That seamless-ness is perfection, and that perfection is part of a Minority Report world – where everything is new, shiny, and pixel perfect. It’s a simulacra of everything – a perfect, shiny beacon of stability. Brands understand this. Every McDonald’s is the same the world over (save for the slightly localized menu to appeal to you in a different local) to offer you a beacon of consistency in an inconsistent, messy world. It’s meant to reassure you:
Betty: Say what you always say.
Don: Everything’s gonna be okay.
(from Mad Men episode 5.03, “Tea Leaves“)
I think about the aesthetics of design and the goal of perfection as an user experience designer a great deal since the thread of perfection seems to play a constant influence in what I do. I aim, of course, to create a perfect experience both for my client (the business hiring me) and the end users of the products I create. I take what the business wants – the metrics and needs they’re trying to address – and find a way to create a marriage between the business and the user, and to make sure that user is able to experience something in a usable, flexible, and delightful product or service. It’s about balance, but it’s also about perfection – and in creating countless design documents, I revise and sketch my way towards a sort of perfection, which is often a delightful digital experience. That vision of what the end state is usually takes versions to get there since a client may not know what that vision is, or how to translate something that works offline into an online experience. This is why tools like prototyping are an important part of the solution in clarifying what that end state is going to be. Even the notion of ‘end state’, though, assumes perfection, and in a world where Web applications are continually evolving in their complexity of features, content and interactions, that perfection is always going to be less than perfect. There’s never a way to capture all the bugs, design all the interactions, and do all the things an interface will do, because we can’t know all the ways a person will interact with something – and we can’t always foresee how those systems will interact, and that the data in those systems will be ready to be delivered. We can even sit down and watch how a user interacts with something, describe their environment, understand their pain and desires thanks to ethnographic research and a ‘Day in the Life’ type studies. But human behaviour is mutable, often unpredictable – and imperfect. In some ways, we’ll never have that perfect in our digital experiences, but we need to build to create those experiences across channels, devices and more – even as we deal with the standard of brand, the Perfect. On some level, it’s also about how we design the Perfect Experience – and how we can document the unexpected, serendipitous but no less perfect parts, too. I’m thinking about how after a page doesn’t show up, the 404 page pops up – and how the smart companies create content that reflects the imperfect, ‘oops, my bad’ experience – and that content strategy and tone is one way to inject the human in a perfectly planned and designed experience. Then again, that 404 page, too, has been designed, so the drive to design perfection never truly leaves us.
In the quest for designing perfection, do we start to hold everything to an unreasonable standard? If we have a bad brand experience, we rush to Yelp to take our rage out; if we have an unpleasant personal encounter, off to the unfriend button rather than talking with someone about their experiences. One might rush to blame the way technology has facilitated those unfriending tools, but think that there’s something in our accelerated culture that goes a bit deeper in than that. Perhaps a constant appetite for superior, perfect everything – experiences, products, customer interactions, services, packaging – makes the slightest flaw more glaring, and we’re already unforgiving to begin with. We become unforgiving, impatient, determined to have our perfect experiences, other people in our ecosystems be damned! The flaws and cracks in the system where things show their imperfection become offense to us. Designing allows us to remove imperfections as we go from rough sketches in pencils, to wonky but kinda-there prototypes, to eventual launched products. There’s an uneasiness in that perfection, though – I worry what gets washed away in that relentless quest and march towards the perfect. I understand the beauty in Plato’s theory of forms and like everyone, long to experience the reassurance of perfection. I also love the messiness of a brush stroke, the sketches before the final product, the story behind an acted scene, and the analysis after the fact that allows me to see something that even a director and writer cannot see on the page. I rush to Tom and Lorenzo‘s blog after an episode of Mad Men, because they – and the audience of commentators – see something differently that I don’t always, and that collective understanding makes me appreciate the art even more. That experiencing something artistic is another kind of perfection, too – even if it’s not a brand experience kind of perfection. It’s a different sort of transcendence, release, beauty and joy – and one that has the edges, too, that make it beautiful even if they’re rough.
Perhaps what we can aim for in designing artificial digital products and services isn’t so much the perfect, known, shiny and plastic brand experience – but more of the artistic, less perfect but no less meaningful thing that comes from art. I’m not even sure it’s fair to create a dualistic continuum of imperfect/artistic/realistic ‘vs’ perfect/planned/plastic – any dualism starts to raise a flag in me to wonder what gets limited in making something either/or, or limited to only two. Maybe there’s a way to have parts in the messy middle, where we design simple, functional applications – and then get out of the way to let messy human parts in all their imperfect, chatty, meandering but charming glory that is human interaction take over. Maybe there’s a recognition that perfection is many things – that for an application for software or a brand, perfection is the goal, but for other more artistic things, beautiful and transcendent can include those imperfections. And maybe even in the digital, we’re able to inject a little more ‘imperfect’ in what we do without diluting a brand experience – after all, we’re humans, not robots, and thank god for the flesh and not the metal and plastic. I don’t think there’s an answer or method or even goal we should aim for – perfection or imperfect. As long as we remember to make room for all the experiences – to remember to:
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
– Leonard Cohen
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