Web designers often say we’re like architects, but are we?

In an effort to articulate what we do for a living, we describe how we “blueprint” our designs, and how our efforts shape the plans for entire projects. When the listener’s eyes go glassy, we say we’re like architects. It sounds sexy.

Problem is, most of the designers using this metaphor seem to equate themselves with great architects. But at best, interaction design is like really bad architecture.

We don’t create spaces that last a hundred years. If we’re lucky, we have a few months before some aspect of them is functionally overhauled, given a new look, or flat-out removed. Our work is in constant flux. Imagine architecture that only lasted a few months before requiring new work.

And our sites become ugly as time passes. Design styles go out of style, and we laugh over the ugly and amateur crap we used to take so much pride in. This makes us like architects that design temporarily fashionable buildings—the ones you see now that look like they were built in the 1970’s.

Sure, some ideas become classics, like the pagination widget used at the bottom of every Google results page, but these things are only classic in “internet time”. Brick-and-mortar classics can persist through hundreds or thousands of years.

In truth, web designers are usually far more like fashion designers. We use lines and snaps and buttons and texture. We (often) focus our designs on specific personality types. We design things that last a single season. We design for perfect people (who do exactly what we think they’ll do).

If we change this—if we start designing things that are strong and beautiful and have lasting power—perhaps, eventually, people will start equating us with architects instead of the other way around.

Doing this is no small task, of course, but it’s the task we’ve dedicated ourselves to. And we owe it to ourselves and our users to start doing a better job.

Two wonderful gifts today for wireframers:

First, the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library team has put together several fantastic stencils. The set includes stencils for iPhone interfaces, grids, calendars, carousels, charts and tables, forms with inline validation, and more. The stencils come in OmniGraffle, Visio, PDF, and PNG formats.

Second—and this may be old news, but I just discovered it—Graffletopia is chock full of free OmniGraffle stencils. Takes a while to browse through them, but it’s worth it.

Enjoy!

In my hotel in Melbourne this week, the room key card must be inserted into a device on the wall by the door to turn the power on each time I come in. When I leave, I have to take it out to carry it with me, thereby turning off the power.

This little poka-yoke device guarantees I can find the key before I leave the room. It guarantees I take it with me. It also guarantees I turn everything off before leaving.

It saves a little bit of mental energy each time I go in or out, and over time, it saves a whole lot of electricity.

The challenge? Apply this idea to web design. If you come up with something, add a comment.

As a consultant, there are two clients on any given design project. One is the business that hired you. The other is the end user.

Both are important, but one matters more than the other.

Today, I was involved in a conversation about a company that intentionally maintains a poor user experience on its commerce site in the interest of driving people to call customer support. Once they call, those crafty customer support people can start in with the up-sells. You may have called to get a problem solved, but their hope is that you’ll spend some cash on a few other things before you hang up.

When posed with this insight into the company’s business model, one designer suggested that we perhaps feel some unease because the model appears to be in opposition to the best interest of the end user. He asked where that leaves us as designers. After all, the business is our client, not the end user, right?

Well, no.

The business that hires you does so for a reason: your design expertise. If you churn out designs based purely on what they want, you tell your client that you’re essentially a factory worker with a copy of Photoshop.

If you do what they hired you to do—be an expert on something—then you’re worth every penny, and you build your reputation and credibility.

Yes, you need the business to inform your decisions and share information about its market, audience, history, and so on. You need them to share their insights and ideas. You need to work together to achieve the goals of the project. But if those goals are aimed at anything other than a good end user experience, then you’re working for the wrong client. The people who sign your checks won’t have checks to sign unless they provide something valuable and good to their customers.

The businesses that hire you want you to be honest. They want you to tell them what you really think. They want you to talk them out of bad ideas. They want to put out something that’s great for their customers.

The end user is always your client. If not, you should fire the one that hired you.

Three years after Katrina, the house in this photograph sits right where the flood waters swept it, across the street from where it was built.

We saw several others like it. But more importantly, we saw a huge number of empty lots where homes no longer even exist. Where nothing is being built to replace them. Where the government has left a community for dead.

A tour of the lower 9th ward in New Orleans (NOLA) reveals that thousands of homes were wiped out and have never been replaced. The upper 9th is seeing new development, but the lower 9th sits just as it has for three long years.

After all this time, three of the top five stories on the local news last week were still about the after effects of the storm. One was about a neighborhood that has still not been fixed up, and a long-delayed plan to do anything about it.

But here’s the kicker.

Another story on the news that night was about a temporary relief plan to lower gas prices a bit over the next few months. During the story, a city official revealed that NOLA could most certainly afford the budget hit that would result from the plan. You see, New Orleans has a 1 billion dollar budget surplus.

He almost smirked as he said it. As though it were laughable that anyone would even ask if the city could afford the plan.

A local told us that the only real way to make a difference in NOLA through donations is to donate directly to Habitat for Humanity.

All that other money that’s been donated? Yeah, that didn’t necessarily go to reconstruction. It went into a budget surplus. It may help some people save a little cash on gas for a little while, but it won’t help the 200,000 people who were displaced by Katrina and have never returned. It won’t help the people who got less money from the government as they should have and couldn’t afford to build new houses in the place they used to call home.

The system was probably not designed to fail this badly. But it has. And no one seems to be doing anything to get it back on track.

Tell me something, Mr. City Official. How is it that the NOLA government, working in conjunction with FEMA, can have that much money in your pocket and not one iota of common sense between you?

When systems fail, we need to get them back in order. It doesn’t matter if you’re a government, a non-profit, or a web startup. When your system fails, so do the people who put their trust in you.

If the system continues to fail—if your constituency continues to fail—you’re done. Finito. You’ll never earn that back.

If your job is to help people succeed, you’d be wise to remember to do it.