Metric-driven evolution vs. aesthetical intention

Disclaimer

I’m speaking primarily from a product design perspective — a discipline that blends visual design, interaction, tech, psychology, and more. This is for designers, product folks, and anyone curious about where design is headed.

Introduction

Questioning the status quo

Formula "Form follows function", declared by an American architect Louis Sullivan, has been the main principle of modernist and modern design for over a century. But is aesthetics of this form yet the part of it?

In recent years of my practice I meet more and more strong opinions regarding rising role of numbers numbers metrics analytics researches numbers in design process. For some, metrics culture is jeopardising aesthetical aspects of product design. Is current product design culture really inflating beauty? And how is it affecting the designers' millieu in general?

Historical context: artisan, visionary and team player

How does designers role change?

How do we measure design success and impact?

In Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value, David Graeber points out that there are three ways of talking about value:

1. “values” in the sociological sense: conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life
2. “value” in the economic sense: the degree to which objects are desired, particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them
3. “value” in the linguistic sense, which goes back to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), and might be most simply glossed as “meaningful difference"

First two of them correspond two major ways of expectations of design work as well:

Way 1. Design must add aesthetical value.

Metrics: Emotional resonance, cultural relevance, aesthetic delight
Tools: Craft, research, storytelling
Risk: Less scalable, less defensible in corporate settings

Way 2: Design must solve the problem.

Maximising value, minimising effort

Most of the modern designers work in this paradigm. They rarer answer the question "Is it beautiful?". First of all they answer "Is it impacting the metric?"

Hence, functionality becomes not just the measure of how fast and successful the user performs their task, but how beneficial it is for the business. Function follows metrics. Does revenue growth and monetary business success equal good user experience and good design?

So, the design solution is good enough if it shows the highest performance in manipulating a metric.

Value equals to revenue: venture capicalist culture, IPO culture – is bringing monetary value to shareholders by any price the main goal of the designer? Can we consider value as cultural, aesthetical, something that just brings joy of seeing, holding, touching?

(comparison table here)

How we work now

Like in the Way 2.

Impact: Consequences for designers, users, and design culture.

Probabaly I'll add here something for introduction.

Visual skill decay

As design tools become more automated and templated — from design systems to generative AI in main tools, like Figma, — there’s less need to understand core principles like typography, color theory, composition, and layout. AI trained on billions of examples following (or not following) (or not quite following – most common case) the rules will give you an average and, hence, optimal visual design solution.

Synthetic empathy and lack of embodied presence

The rise of AI user simulators and research surrogates — like Synthetic Users (https://www.syntheticusers.com) — could make research faster, but also more abstract. Without face-to-face interviews, contextual visits, or emotional resonance, designers risk losing the very intuition and care that qualitative methods build.

Loss of experimentation

In the pursuit of metric wins, experimentation shifts from conceptual or visual risks to button color tweaks. The room for surprise — for making something truly weird or new — keeps shrinking. Design patterns as we know them appeared as a result of deep work based on theory of metaphors (Lakoff) and explorations of our experiences (Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander). Patterns of collective presence (Google Docs, Figma), LLM's are machines based on reciprocity and prediction: they cannot generate something new just because they are made to repeat and synthesise what is already done.

Future implications

Here are my pure speculations, but I'll allow myself make a parallel with the production of consumer goods – in the end, I'm not academic researcher and you don't have to believe me.

With the development of AI, in the field of digital experiences can arise differentiation between

1. AI-powered (where the AI is a tool, not just a product) mass production

Era of evolutionary product machines.

Interfaces and products for millions of people, running dozens of experiments simultaneously and monitoring hundreds and thousands of metrics, generating hypotheses from them, creating new queues of experiments, drawing conclusions from them and changing interfaces automatically based on all this data.

And maybe even changing interfaces for each cohort of users depending on what color button converts better for them and increasing conversion rates to almost 100% (in theory)

2. Artisanal creation

Products for small groups of users, who are willing to pay a lot for doing what is expected of those apps without experimenting and changing the interfaces and functions of the product.

Probably for groups of users, who can afford not to have LinkedIn, Airbnb, Facebook or other apps, or can outsource the tasks intended for these tools.

And so what?

Welcome to the neoliberalism!

Value of design work cannot be measured only in monetary value. But we got caught in the economic situation (neoliberalism), where only revenue is something that can be quantified. This is not an allowance to turn into metrics and retention oriented designer.