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One of the benefits of consulting is that you get to work with a lot of different clients on a lot of different projects. The more projects and clients you work for, the more diversity you see in domain, purpose, design, and error. Sometimes when we (the company I work for) have a hard time explaining research findings to a client, we will use stories, examples, or analogies to help get the point across.

Here are some of my favorite expressions we use when describing design problems internally and to clients.

Repainting the House

When the client is just trying to refresh the look and feel of a product and isn’t interested in fixing any issues, they are just “repainting” the product to look fresh and new without actually improving it. It’s the same as someone who repaints a house to make it look new and improved while they haven’t repaired anything on the inside.

Band-aids and Duct Tape

Sometimes you need to make immediate design changes to try and temporarily alleviate a critical design problem until you can fix it. Often these are critical conceptual problems that cause the user to fail a task and do not have an easy solution or the solution will take a while to deisgn and develop. Patching the design with a band-aid is a way to fix a surface problem enough that it improves from failure to possible — but, it does not ultimately solve the root of the problem. These stop-gap measures are often necessary; however, clients tend to forget they are temporary. Duct tape can only hold something together for so long.

Lipstick on a Bulldog

When a client is only committed to fixing minor issues and chooses to ignore the major issues, they are essentially “putting lipstick on a bulldog”. Even if they fix the minor issues, there will still be major issues which greatly effect the usability of the product. Fixing minor issues will only have a small impact on the overall usability, especially if the major issues are left unfixed. The bulldog might look better, but it’s still a bulldog.

Fleas on a Dog

Even in the best designs we will find small and inconsequential issues — minor oversights in an overall solid design. Individually one of these issues will not be noticeable to a user, but compounded may make some elements appear unpolished and awkward. Just as one flea on a dog is no problem; the more fleas there are, the more the dog is annoyed. Having “fleas on a dog” is not a bad thing because the issues are usually very minor and easily fixed.

Back to the Drafter’s Table

Sometimes a product design will really miss the target, generating conceptual-level issues which cause inefficiency and errors in work processes. Often, the only way to solve these problems is to toss the design all and start over — just as a core structural problem in a building would require the architect to redraft his plans.