designed for likes

Designed for likes, instead of people

If there’s one thing that catches your eyes when scrolling through networks where creators share their work, like Dribble and Behance, then it’s this: it all looks pretty much the same. And that’s exactly the problem.

According to designer Sahadeva Hammari, good design is created based on a wide range of creative, psychological, communication, and problem-solving skills. However, today’s designers are often remixing what receives lots of likes: the dominant patterns and trends created by popular tech companies. They want their designs to appear as stylistically sophisticated as the work they’re emulating, regardless of what kind of product they’re designing and for whom.

Likes are often given to what’s aesthetically pleasing, instead of what seems to be functional. Whereas when looking at what’s important to people we often see that functionality plays a big role in what they are buying in the end. For example, people are more likely to trade off aesthetics than functionality in order to buy sustainable products.  Although Hammari talks about design specifically, there’s a universal truth in what she says that can be applied to all product and service innovations: If we create based on what people say they like in the first place, we might risk designing something that is not what the customer needs at all.