What corsets and shampoo can teach us about design and problem solving

The 21st-century experience—our current milieu of insidiously hypnotizing social media, regurgitated and derivative “reality” TV, and frantic rat-race capitalism—is one in which we are bullied and berated into smaller and more homogeneous experiences. There is so much out there and we’re struggling so hard just to get by that, when it comes to dealing with problems, most of us have become lazy, complacent, and rather unimaginative.

It’s all we can do to just copy someone else and move on to the next thing-we-have-to-do. We lurch from trend to trend to trend: cooking competitions and food-delivery apps and Uber-for-X over and over and over and over. We worship at the cult of whatever everyone else is doing because it’s quick and easy and right in front of us. And in the tech industry, trendiness is made even worse by the scale of deployments and the speed of development, sharing, and uptake of whatever is new and cool.

You see, blindly following the latest trends conditions us to focus on what is quick and easy while ignoring the much more important questions about what is needed or what could be possible. Too many of the issues with your products or on your websites or in your applications are caused by lazy, uneducated decisions made during design and development. We can do better. We should do better. Here’s why.

I. Trends don’t last

I get it—following the pack is easy. Mimicking others saves time and energy. And yeah, you may get some praise for following a trend that is “fashionable” or “popular,” but when that trend is over, you’ll have to start over too. And over time, as this pattern repeats, people will start to realize that either you’re lazy or that you don’t have any original ideas of your own (or both).

When was the last time you woke up in the morning and got that forlorn, longing feeling that could only be sated by cinching your waist to point of cracked ribs? Unless you’re a drag queen, probably never. That’s because corsets aren’t in style anymore. Thank god! Along with jazzercise, and Beany Babies, and the clapper, corsets are no longer cool or fashionable. That’s because trends don’t last. In fact, the word “trend” means “a current style or preference” or “a prevailing tendency or inclination.” They are temporal experiences—defined by a particular (i.e., limited, isolated) period of time.

All trends come with an expiry date. That means that if your project or application or website puts too much weight on what’s “trendy,” you’re unnecessarily giving your already-unoriginal work a limited shelf-life and dooming it to the forgotten trash pile of history among long-forgotten QR codes, hammer pants, and Google+.

Wherever I see people doing something the way it’s always been done, the way it’s ‘supposed’ to be done, following the same old trends, well that’s just a big red flag for me to go look somewhere else.

II. Trends don’t work for everyone

Following trends is about easy success. It’s about best guesses and averages and applying a “thing” that already exists to a “group” that already exists. But products and services and processes built for the average person only work for people that perfectly fit within the all of the existing parameters. Trends are exclusionary by their very nature and products and services that simply seek to mimic others are often the least inclusive, thought through, or generally applicable.

Scrum development serves as a great example of this point. Blindly adopting Scrum practices without considering whether they fit or make sense or improve on existing practices will often create problems rather than solve them.

Some kinds of development don’t easily fit into standard time-boxed sprints. Some developers who are used to working autonomously may feel scrums are unnecessary and/or slow them down. Scrum’s specific approach also add unexpected overhead to many development processes which may not have been budgeted for. Scrum can emphasize delivery over quality and development over planning.

These aspects aren’t inherently good or bad but they need to be understood and thoughtfully considered before determining whether Agile is the approach that is needed. Are you using it because it will solve the problem of how to get this project out the door? Or are you simply using it because everyone else is?

III. Trends don’t stand out

And as more and more people or products jump on whatever bandwagon is passing through town, each successive iteration of that trend gets more and more hasty, watered-down, short-sighted, and derivative. It’s the reason that all websites look the same—that thin sans serif text over an opaque full-width stock photo of a hand holding a phone or an office or a sunset.

Due to the pressure to perform/optimize/monetize/whatever, success in one place is copied and applied everywhere else. The success (or failure) is what guides our decisions, rather than what is possible or what is needed or what could be done differently. Problem-solving gives way to copy-catting.

The tech industry is perhaps the worst offender—it continually praises itself for creativity and innovation but keeps selling us a success story by simply regurgitating and repackaging the same things over and over and over and over. You’re never going to stand out by doing something someone else has already done.

“Google+ was one of the most ambitious bets in the company’s history,” according to Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. But in terms of social networking, Facebook was already dominant and Google+ failed to offer anything genuinely new.

And even if it had, the incumbent social network was already far more popular (aka trending). Google+ and other hasty, derivative copycats were doomed to live in Facebook’s shadow from day one just as the Microsoft Zune was doomed to live in the iPod’s shadow. In tech, more so than many other fields, the bandwagon is moving so fast—almost everyone who jumps on, quickly tumbles off.

Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.

IV. Trends aren’t about you, your product, or your vision

When you lose focus of what sets you apart, what you can provide that others can’t, you slowly start to lose yourself. The result is that your (or your company’s) identity becomes an ugly collage of tchotchkes stolen from everywhere—anywhere else.

You may very well stand out, but it will probably be for the wrong reasons. For every nine companies that rush to infuse their hair care products with natural ingredients (kiwi, coconut, lime) one unfortunate imitator will choose to market yogurt shampoo in a bold but foolish attempt leverage that trendiness. And instead of co-opting the success of its predecessors, it will end up poisoning their customers when they decide to eat the yogurt shampoo instead of putting it in their hair (a product which will eventually end up as #4 on Time Magazine’s list of the 10 Worst Product Fails of all Time).

In fact, most of the items on such lists are instances of a company ignoring their mission, their past successes, and the needs of their customers and instead lurching blindly for the latest trend. Crystal Pepsi, the Zune, the HP Touchpad. Too many companies ignore their unique vision or mission and instead choose to worship at the altar of a red herring. A Wired article from 2016 looked at the website AngelList (where startups can court angel investors and employees) and counted 526 different companies that included “Uber for” in their descriptions.

The mass “Uber for X” excitement is a good example of what happens when we don’t stop to investigate a trend, asking difficult questions and challenging our cherished beliefs.

Uber, as a company, is flawed. But its service can serve as an example of how to take a unique set of conditions (outdated taxicab technologies and restrictive business models, shrinking car ownership) and a unique set of opportunities (mobile apps and payment, high unemployment and unused private vehicles) and solve a problem (getting around in the city quickly and cheaply) in a new way.

And that’s why Uber only really works for Uber—for its specific market, its specific platform, and the conditions that aligned in the very specific moment in time it was launched. Assuming that you will also succeed by blindly applying a similar platform to a different market (Uber for ice cream, Uber for snowplows, Uber for haircuts—those are real examples) or with a different set of conditions (the desire for ice cream, the availability snowplows, the frequency of haircuts) is as short-sighted as it is arrogant—not to mention the issue of idolizing and imitating a company with a depressingly steady stream of scandals and sexual harassment allegations.

Buck the trend

If the proposition of standing out from the crowd seems hard, that’s because it is. Trends exist because people are lazy and boring and unoriginal. Trying to imagine what else might be possible is daunting if you always wear the same thing and eat and the same places and hang out with the same people and go to the same spot for vacations. Too many of us haven’t experienced enough different people, places, and things to offer a unique perspective when faced with a new problem or a new project or a new opportunity.

So how do you buck the trend? Expand your horizons, try new things, create new networks of friends, ideas, and things. Try a new sport, eat new food, listen to new music, take up a hobby that you would never have considered in the past. Sure, you can keep tabs on the trends but you should look elsewhere for ideas and inspiration. Once you learn to find and weave together those random, disparate threads you’ve been oblivious to, you will be able to see and think and work in completely new ways.

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

The people whose ideas we do remember—the Steve Jobs and the Serena Williams and the JK Rowlings and the Andy Warhols of the world—all did things differently in spite of the trends. They become a new trend. They look at what everyone else is doing and then find a different, better way to make a computer, to play a sport, to tell a story, or to express themselves.

History has set this precedent time and time again. Don’t believe me? Back in the 15th century when everyone else was trying to spread Christianity by hand-copying bibles one at a time with a quill and ink, one young man bucked the trend and decided to do things differently. The now-famous printing press came to be only because Johannes Gutenberg tried to solve a problem—how to sell more bibles—in a new way. As luck had it, he was familiar with both moveable type and the large screw presses used for making wine. He could have just done what everyone else was doing but instead, he tried something new and ended up changing history.

Sure—we probably won’t all have the same impact as a Gutenberg or a Jobs or Warhol, but that sure doesn’t mean we should give up trying.