This is one of the most frequent questions that I have been coming across lately in my life. Any work or task that I have to do, I start off by asking myself, Why? Why should I do it? How is it going to matter? Finding answers to questions like these is an exciting task for me these days and if the answer to this “Why?” is strong enough, it gives me a lot of clarity and focus while I set my mind to do that task.

This Why is one of the most important questions that we product designers must address. Why are we building this product? Why will the users use it? etc. We can dig into the details about product designing from resources on the internet, but since we are talking about the “why”, I think in the first place, it’ll be better to start with the question, “Why am I a product designer?”

I had a question that out of all the animals present on Earth for a millennia, why was it that only humans were able to evolve so much? We are a race that has created super-complex systems like economics, marriages, law and order, etc. We are about to set foot on other planets and build settlements there. We have created machines that themselves have the power to create. A human being is a God in himself. Why was it that only one race was able to achieve this, out of so many living species present on this planet?

I found the answer in the book Sapiens. One of the reasons is because of the invention of fire. Look at animals around. They only have three jobs. Eat, sleep, and reproduce. Animals eat and then keep digesting the food while sleeping. When early humans (Homo Sapiens) started to control fire, they began to eat cooked food. Cooked food took less time to digest and in turn, humans slept a little less as compared to other animals. When our ancestors were awake, they spent time communicating more with each other. Our language evolved. Our minds evolved. We started to travel more. Explore more territories. We began to stand on our two feet. We started to have more control over our hands and fingers. The human brain kept evolving more and more and the reason was, we were doing a lot more as compared to other animals.

Now, if you have been talking to some of your designer friends, you might have heard them talking them about this so and so process taking three clicks and they are trying to cut it down to two (or even less). Is such a minor change so important? Are the designers’ lives just about minimizing clicks? Or did you hear from some of your other friends it’s about problem-solving? Well, whatever you might have heard, I’d say, product designing is about simplifying the lives of human beings. Making them achieve their goals faster, or providing alternate and better ways to achieve their goals. Now, I’ll ask again, why? Why is it important that we achieve our goals quickly? Yup! It was answered in Sapiens. It is because it gives the window to humans to do more. So that the human race could achieve more. More than it has achieved in the past.

This is the reason why I am so enthusiastic about being a product designer.

The downside?:

The life of early-human beings was tough. They had no GPS to go to the correct locations. They followed the stars. They had to remember which fruit is poisonous and which one is edible. If they saw a footmark of an animal, they must be able to figure out how old the mark is, which animal it might belong to. Because of all this, the homo-sapiens had to use a lot of their brain for their survival. This again was one of the reasons why the brains of our ancestors evolved so much. Proven by research also, the size of the human brain actually kept increasing in the past, until 10,000 years ago. Since then our species hasn’t evolved much. Because evolution is a result of survival and humans have been building and using technology in order to survive.

Now, who builds the tech? There are crazy visionaries who imagine a change and there are designers who plan on how to achieve that change and then there are engineers who execute that plan. The designers are bridge between a vision and an actionable plan.

So now in the recent past, some researches have shown that the size of the human brain has decreased a bit. Does it mean that humans are becoming dumb? That might be the case. Is it because now the lives are becoming too simple? Have the product designers done a really good job? Or the product designers are leading the human race to extinction? Well, I had specified above that the job of designers is to make lives easier so that humans could do more… in the extra time that they get. But what if they choose to make TikTok videos or keep watching some TV series on Netflix in that time? Do we blame it on them? Some do use the time productively and make effective use of that. There is also a possiblity that not all of our ancestors were productive and some were procrastinators too. And one can make an argument that it takes thousands of years to see the result of evolution so none of this matters.

So the question whether simplifying lives is really a downside is pretty much vague. But sometimes I do wonder, should designers design products that make achieving the goals a little complex so that people have to use more of their brains? What do you think? 🤔