Life of Design: Chad Thornton

had has moved on to Design Director at DropBox. He graciously gave his time and answers while still the Head of Design at Medium.

1. How did you begin working in the wonderful world of design?

I’d planned to be a biologist. Behavior, ecology, evolution — that was my jam. But labs are where most biology happens now, and that was less interesting.

UX/interaction design has similar underlying themes — at least to me — and I was also interested in education, so I joined a startup developing online courseware. After that I helped run a user research lab at Intuit, left to build up my design chops at CMU’s interaction design program, and then joined Google as one of their first designers.

2. What is the purpose of design?

Herb Simon said, “to design is to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Broad, but still my favorite definition.

To extend that definition into specific contexts, I like how Jess McMullin laid it out in his design maturity continuum. At the most basic, design makes things work better.

Zooming out, design can solve problems. At its most aspirational, design reframes the problems that entire organizations focus on.

3. How would you describe the intent (mission) behind Medium’s design?

Medium serves two audiences: writers and readers. For writers, we want to empower them to write their best work, find an audience for that work, and (if they’re interested) compensate them based on how much paying members appreciate their work. For readers, our goal is to inspire, educate, challenge, and entertain, and to get better at doing that every time they come back.

4. What’s one thing you believe about design that most others don’t?

Design is as much about the words as it is about the images.

5. What key problems are often overlooked by design?

Process problems: how designers operate most effectively within a product team, and how we learn about and then follow through to improve designs once they’ve shipped.

6. What is the most difficult thing about design?

7. When is design “done”?

Design is effectively finished when the team isn’t committed to further iterations beyond what shipped. But if that willingness exists, there’s still design happening.

8. What does the future of design look like to you?

What design will focus on:

Evolving inputs (voice, eye tracking, controllers, gestures) and outputs (VR, AR, voice only). New opportunities: machine learning, blockchain technologies. Plus, the same old problems as ever: how we present ourselves to others (“social media”), how we work together in teams, and how we improve tools to get stuff done.

How design changes as a process and discipline

• Better tools, and an evolving relationship with engineers.
• Full cycle, not full stack. Also embracing what happens behind the scenes, designing both the tooling to administer and adjust features as well as the visualizations to better understand how people are using it.
• More like services, not just products. Multi-channel, lifecycle focused. More nuanced around customization and personalization.
• Further integration into teams to frame problems as well as solutions, but also greater disintermediation through use of pre-existing patterns, libraries, and such.

Thanks for reading ❤

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This series was designed by Vasjen Katro, Visual Designer of Baugasm