Darlene Price, author of Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results writes about "career-limiting phrases" that "jeopardize one's professional image and potential for promotion." Price goes further to say that “employees who use certain phrases will likely be replaced with those who convey a more positive attitude, collaborative spirit, proactive behavior, and professional demeanor."

As Design Leaders and UX for AI enthusiasts, we hear from several dozens of people per week. We've seen a gamut of toxic behaviors that antagonize and push away competent and dedicated designers (ourselves included). However,

Here are four reasons why you should ban the word "prettify" from your office in 2024:

1) "Prettify" is dismissive and pejorative when applied to design

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "pretty" both as “typically pleasing but unnecessary accessory" and "attractive" without being truly beautiful or handsome." In other words, something is ultimately unnecessary and of low value.

Design is a whole slew of practices aimed at helping the team achieve business goals with maximum efficiency, bringing innovative technologies (including AI) to the market while reducing risk, avoiding wasting resources, and generally improving the competitiveness of your enterprise. The impact of Product and Service Design on business outcomes is thoroughly documented: it generates billions in ROI annually in a huge variety of industries, transforms lives, and impacts societies on a global scale. Two of my favorite projects to bring up when discussing Product Design are the US Highway System (designed to enable a driver to go from coast to coast without stopping) and the electric light bulb and socket system designed to bring safe, reliable, and cheap light to every home and workplace in a world.

The same goes for Visual Design and Branding, which is just as valuable and certainly more nuanced. Leading brands like Coke, Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Under Armour (to name but a few) cite billions of dollars in brand equity. Brand equity is painstakingly created using millions of pieces of collateral, deliberate touchpoints, and key experiences stored in collective memory as the sophisticated emotional and factual relationship people have with your company.

Is design having a valuable impact on your organization? No? Could it be because you are inadvertently using vague and imprecise words like"prettify"?

2. "Prettify" is vague and imprecise

Design works best as a way to achieve specific business goals for a particular audience at a precise moment in time. Good design assignments are actionable. They strive to precisely define what you are trying to achieve and for whom. In contrast, "prettify" is vague and imprecise.

For example, the designers of the US Highway System were given a specific, actionable vision: "Drive a car coast to coast without stopping." Imagine if, instead, these designers were told to "prettify" some roads. Would we have ended up with billions of dollars of flower urns adorning every intersection, with no relief of congestion in sight?

The same goes for visual design: exact phrasing helps focus the design on the needs of a specific audience. "Make it colorful, edgy and modern, something that Billie Eilish would use" would result in a very different design from: "Make it trustworthy, safe, familiar, and unintimidating, such that older people with weak eyesight could use it without glasses."

The word "prettify" has none of those things, and neither does it indicate what would make the design successful.

3. "Prettify" has no measurable success condition

Another issue with the word "prettify" is that it has no measurable success condition. If a designer is "prettifying" something, how does she know when to stop? When is the design "pretty" enough? Who decides the right level of "prettiness"? Chances are the business leader who assigns the job to a designer is the only one who is also qualified to measure the right level of "prettiness," as the word has no qualifying success condition, which means nearly endless iterations of intensive, demanding (and costly) high-fidelity design work.

Early in his career, Greg was tasked with creating 47 iterations of the same design over a period of 3 months. None of his designs have been judged "pretty" enough, so the work continued, creating a complete waste of time, effort, and resources and achieving no business objective whatsoever.

Through techniques like user research, personas, user journeys, and vision storyboarding, we stand ready to help you define the problem, sharpen your vision, and determine the criteria for success. However, these activities take time, including planning and collaboration with other teams, which brings us to DesignOps, yet another thing that the word "prettify" ignores.

4. "Prettify" ignores collaboration and operational constraints

The best way to achieve a repeatable successful outcome for your company is for Business, Development, Data Science, and Design to work together from the beginning. What we’ve in the past called a “four-in-a-box approach.” That is the method routinely practiced by leading tech companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, Salesforce, and many others. Instead of asking design to "prettify" something after it’s built for your next project, try inviting designers into the room for a joint discussion to help with problem definition. You may be surprised at the outcome. 

Now, we’re not saying every single little button or field needs feedback or review. That is neither possible nor desirable. Robust, well-built Design Systems are a foundation of DesignOps and have a fantastic way of empowering development teams to make confident, independent decisions. However, to function appropriately, Design Systems must be created and maintained through the ongoing collaboration between Design and Development teams, the concept that the word "prettify" completely ignores.

Don’t “Prettify” in the Age of AI

UX Design teams today can help you make AI systems work for your company or organization, including everything we’ve been talking about in this column for the past six months: selecting the appropriate use case, maximizing the ROI of AI predictions, making sure AI is ethical and humane, selecting the right UI metaphor to engage the customers, selecting the right data visualization to convey results in a way that makes them actionable for your users, and so much more.

Our entire purpose here at UXforAI.com has been to empower UX teams to have higher-quality, more in-depth conversations with their teammates and to maximize the effectiveness of UX at this crucial juncture for all of humanity.

How to fix your ugly "prettify" problem

Whenever you are tempted to ask someone to "prettify" something, substitute a more precise statement that reflects the goals of your project and the way the specific customer would feel about the project when it’s completed. Add a success condition, which must be satisfied to count the project as a win. If you are not sure, ask a designer for help in defining the problem, the audience, and the criteria for success.

If you are building something reasonably routine, your developers can safely rely on a sound Design System. However, if you find the scope growing, or if something isn’t 100% clear or feels entirely right (particularly in AI-First projects!), that is the time to call the Designers, not after the whole thing is developed. Engaging Design early in the process will avoid hurt, disappointment, and burnout from your designers and will help your AI product or service shine, usually with less development time spent taking wrong turns that you will have to fix later at a much greater expense.

So whether you say "prettify" as an ongoing practice or happen to say it only rarely, it’s critical for your continuing success as a business leader that you recognize when you’re making this faux pas and shift to a a more productive mode. Remove the toxic word “prettify” from your vocabulary and ban it from your office in 2024.

UX will help you succeed with AI; just please don’t ask us to “prettify” anything!

Greg & Daria