‘The design of everyday things’
The design of everyday things is in great danger of becoming the design of superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things. Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
In the early 1990s, human-centered design has become a standard. In the early 2000s, the design thinking movement launched, linking design more closely to business innovation. It’s the spirit of the “New Bauhaus”, as we continue to define what it means to design today.
We’re surrounded by objects, magnificent tools as extensions of ourselves, our thoughts and actions. Designer’s role must embrace a commitment to design better interactions, better experiences, to construct a better environment and ultimately a better world.
UNDERSTANDABLE DESIGN
Example of a collapsible chair:
Functional
Practical
Useful
Beautiful (material, color)
CONFUSING DESIGN
Example of cutlery tools:
Beautiful as an art object
Non-functional
Not practical
Definitely not useful (at least the spoon)
Below are two well designed chairs, the adjustable Tripp Trapp and the Balans kneeling chair, both designed by Peter Opsvik in the 70’s. Both are best-selling items, used by thousand of people around the world, fulfilling the required ergonomic goals.
The design of ‘superfluous, overloaded, unnecessary things’, like the ostensible cutlery above, live together with badly designed objects and truly horrific experiences.
When developing a website or any other product, a mobile or a web app, the UX strategy must include a clear understanding of its audience (and a broader understanding of human behaviour). The user has to be the main goal of the user experience; in other words, the user experience is worthless without the user. He will be the one who’s going to buy a product, evaluate his medical condition, enroll in some eLearning classes, etc.
UX design is a complex field. The role of a designer when creating great UX is to combine the user needs, business goals and technical constraints. The intersection of those three factors reveals a good UX practice.
Vitra is a Swiss family-owned furniture company, the manufacturer of the works of many internationally renowned designers. While their beautiful objects provide wonderful experiences, Vitra’s very recent website evolved attempting to bring the users a better navigation experience.
The navigation through the site, to find other products or more information regarding Vitra’s designers and action within the market, was previously scattered (the website had three navigation menus in three different locations). When the user clicked on the Products menu at the top of the page, an informative text advised, “Filter your viewing selection according to category, topic or designer.”. Shouldn’t that be intuitive?
In the renewed website products are now better organized in categories and subcategories (multilevel). This redesign is a compromised solution between the previous website and new interface solutions, like the dropdown submenus. But Vitra’s should also consider a more intuitive filtering system with the capability of doing multiple choices like for instance more than one designer. warbyparker.com is a good example in my opinion, regarding the filtering mechanism.
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible.”
― Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Bad design is present everywhere and seriously hinders our lives. In 2014 Google put an end to the difficult hard-to-read “Captchas” and introduced the single checkbox next to the statement “I’m not a robot.”. “For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience,” says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. “They basically get a free pass. You can solve the captcha without having to solve it.”
With reCAPTCHA Google just made it easier to prove you’re not a robot and reduce user’s frustrating experience to decipher the same old distorted text.
Google is calling it “the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA experience”, a “free service that protects your website from spam and abuse” that enhances and simplifies our experience.
As a conclusion and in the words of one of the Nielsen Norman Group founders:
Three Tips: Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. ― Jakob Nielsen
