How a record from the 1960s can teach us the right way to re-use design assets
Learn how to remix old designs instead of plagiarizing them
Source: Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
Sometimes, digging around in old project folders can lead to an unexpected treasure trove.
You'll sometimes encounter a strange issue when you work for larger organizations. You’ll be tasked to re-design something, and you won’t be the first designer to do so. Your stakeholders might outline project requirements and give you some resources on where you should look for more information.
But when digging around in old folders, you stumble on an unexpected treasure: a fully built old prototype. It has all the interactions your project team wants, and everything seems to work how your stakeholders want.
Is it time to waste time for the next two weeks, knowing that all your designs can just be copied from the old prototype? Not exactly.
After all, you’d be falling into the same trap that has sunk entire projects and companies: ignoring how context (especially time) has changed.
Context always changes
Imagine if you were a junior designer looking for jobs in late 2019. You’d just graduated from a BootCamp (or grad school) and were looking to find your first Design job.
How do you think you would have been treated if you asked, or even demanded, to work remotely full-time? You will most likely be on the job market for a long time.
Interviewers kind enough not to laugh behind closed doors would inform you that wasn’t something they could offer, especially to positions at your experience level.
Imagine asking in late 2020, after the world’s largest Work-From-Home experiment due to Covid-19. Many companies might offer full-time remote ‘temporarily’ until it was safe to return to the offices.
Consider if you asked for that today after some tech giants have promised to offer full-time remote work forever. Context constantly changes, and it’s not always due to factors in your control.
So you can’t trust that the old design, with its different context, is the best approach to the problems you’re facing nowadays. Something critical that affected the design might not matter now, as you’ve changed to a different backend language.
And it’s not worth it to dig through months of old e-mails and presentations to decipher what the old page was designed for.
But that doesn’t mean you must completely rebuild the design from scratch.
Instead, you can take a cue from a 1960’s song called “Amen, Brother,” the most sampled song in the world.
Understanding sampling and remixing
I’m not a music critic, so that I won’t discuss anything about the song’s quality. But it’s hard to imagine that this (instrumental) song has had a massive influence in multiple genres, including Hip-hop, Drum and Bass, Jungle Beat, and British Dance Music. It’s even used in popular TV series like Futurama’s Theme.
But sampled doesn’t mean that the entire song has been used. Instead, one portion of it, a short sample of the drums called the Amen Break, has been the core element that’s been adapted in multiple ways.
This highlights how you should approach old prototypes. Of course, parts of the whole thing are valuable, but you shouldn’t copy everything: that’s not only plagiarism; it might not even work for the project at hand.
But the wide variety of genres the song has been used in also clues you into one crucial fact: you must know what you want to design before you start sampling. After all, the sample can’t tell you what type of song you should make because it could be used in hundreds of different ways.
So how do you begin with this process? By outlining your project.
How to outline your project
When I talk about outlining your project, it starts with how you’d typically start any other UX Research process. This begins by talking with users, stakeholders, and more to understand the project goals and how the current design works. The goal of this process is the same as always, but with one additional thing added: figuring out what the user likes about the current design.
We often ask one fundamental question about designs during user testing:
What do you like about this design?
It’s usually as you’re wrapping up user testing, and often the user gives a generic answer (if they choose to answer at all).
However, it might be more helpful to dig deeper into what is good about a system, especially if you have current users to talk with. But it would help if you didn’t think like a junkyard operator, looking for things to salvage.
Instead, you want to outline the basics of your website as you talk with them, understanding what tasks they’re likely to do just like you might with any other project using Design Thinking.
However, the outline serves almost like the framework of a song might: it helps to distinguish the elements that make up the overall song and what type of genre something is.
When all that is done, now’s the time to consider the pieces of the old prototype. Are there specific interactions your users or stakeholders particularly like about the old version? It can be as large as the layout of a search page to as small as the default sort being by rating.
You want to consider taking these pieces from the old prototype. However, it’s not like you’re assembling designs piecemeal: if you’re taking what currently exists, set aside some time to ensure consistency with the rest of the website and interactions.
However, this is how most artists think about these samples: The amen break is just a few short seconds of a longer piece. But while those few seconds have been sampled more than 5,000 times, the entire piece has only been covered three times.
Using pieces of a design interaction that works is often more fruitful than reinventing the wheel and allows you to focus on what truly matters: the design interactions or usability problems that probably sparked the re-design in the first place.
Remixing designs can be more learnable than starting from scratch
As you’re re-designing a project, one thing to keep in mind is that there’s always a learning curve for users.
Even if the current design is the crappiest thing in the world, many users may have used it for months or years, getting used to the ins and outs of the system. So yanking them to an entirely new way of thinking through designs, even if it’s better designed, takes some getting used to.
So if there are ways to preserve what works for users while re-designing the parts that don’t, then it can be a faster and more efficient way of getting your users back on track with their daily tasks.
So if you ever encounter an old prototype, don’t ignore it to reinvent the wheel. Instead, spend some time thinking if any of the parts are worth remixing into a new design.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer and a top Design Writer on Medium. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.