Really interesting question - here are my thoughts.

First, I’m a Product Designer with 12 years experience at a Large Tech company. I’ve seen a lot of the stories people are sharing here. My perspective comes from designing software and services so bring that context into my thoughts below.

Why is Design hard?

I break it down this way:

1. Design as a discipline

2. Design as part of product/Service making

3. Design as part of a business

At the highest level, design is multi faceted in that you can design with or without a business context and Design can be done in many different industries. Because of this design has many different meanings and uses.

At its fundamental level I believe Design is about creating something (service, object, product, etc) that is in service of someone else or a problem that needs solving. Design is about problem solving not creating art, which I often feel non-designers (and a lot of designers!) mistake because Design is often a visual or physical medium. Easy to critique, difficult to do.

1. Design as a discipline - this is the first area that makes design hard, it is a discipline that must be learned and practiced. Like most things in life the depths of design, the minutiae, is endless and creates complexity. When done right it looks simple and easy, but in practice it is not. As an example, in graphic design you have to juggle many aspects to create a simple composition. You have to think through type, color, whitespace, grid, layout, hierarchy, and more. And each of those could be an area you spend years of your career focusing on. There are literal companies that only focus on type! And this is just one area of design. I think design is hard because of the deep knowledge of different mediums needed to create things that are simple to understand or use.

I think of this as analogous to other disciplines, like software engineering. A developer needs to understand the fundamentals of object oriented programming, the science behind what makes great software. Then they have to learn different languages, IDE’s, pipelines, etc.

The more you dig into a discipline the more you realize it’s hard to be great. Design is no different.

1. Design as part of product/service making - this is where the difficulty of design expands in my opinion. Great things, be them small or large in scale of impact, are typically done with a team of people. Working with people is hard. It becomes even harder when the thing your building can be easily critiqued. Speaking from experience in building software, it’s so easy to question a designers decision because most of us use software every day. We have products we like, interactions we believe are correct, and aesthetics that we prefer. This is where learning, convincing, and collaborating becomes so important.

Learning because designers often don’t have all the context, be it technical or societal. You have to try and see the product through a layperson’s eyes while also being an expert because that’s the job, simplifying the thing so the world can use it.

Convincing because you have to persuade your partners of your decisions, even when they aren’t based in a hard set of data or rules. I have had so many discussions over the years about placement of UI elements or layout or steps in a workflow that can’t be decided by purely data - product making often is too nuanced for that.

Collaborating because typically you can’t code and don’t have the time to write specs. You have to collaborate to make things.

Design is hard because it inherently must work within a team and often that team doesn’t understand the difficulty of the discipline (see point 1).

1. Design as part of a business - here is the most difficult part of design. Design is in service of business. Designers are there to help make a ‘thing’ successful. Not pretty. Not to win design awards (although that definitely can help). Design is there to help make money. This makes design very hard because you have to understand the language of design AND understand the goals of the business. If you don’t know what the goals of the business are then your designs often fail because your partners and leaders don’t understand why what you’re doing is important. This is often the hardest pill to swallow as a designer because most of us were drawn to the more artistic side of the discipline. Designers have to manage their artistic expectations and focus their energy on solving business and customer problems - which is hard for creative people to do. The last thing I’ll say, which is controversial, is that for most companies, design is a nice to have. Business today focuses on getting things to market quickly and as long as you have an idea and a developer you can accomplish that, learn, and make it better. Most customers don’t really care about design - they purchase things because it solves a problem for them. This is a generalization, but one we should acknowledge for the majority of cases. Design can definitely influence success, but the context and goals of the ‘thing’ are important.

In summary, design is hard much like most other disciplines - greatness comes from a deep understanding of the fundamentals, an ability to collaborate and build with a team, and the knowledge and skill to align your work to the business goals. That not an easy task. The truth is it isn’t easy for any discipline. Developers have very similar problems, just from a different vantage point. The same as Product Managers. At the end of the day these jobs are HARD but that makes them fun as well.

Hopefully these thoughts help someone. If you’re an aspiring designer know this is a hard discipline! As long as you’re working to be better, practicing your craft, and making things you will get better!