The Importance of Design
As a new year slowly flows, I wanted to take some time to tell you about something important: Design.
You see, Design is everywhere.
From your coffee machine to your <Insert the name of your favorite app> app, from the subway map to your favorite restaurant’s menu. Everything in the world you live in has been designed. It means that someone, at a given time, sat down and thought, draw plans, create, execute what you are using everyday.
Design is often related to User Experience (UX). User Experience is the experience a person has while using a product or service.
Like Design, User Experience is everywhere.
You compare flight prices and buy a ticket online? That’s UX.
You take a cab to the airport and then go check-in? That’s UX.
You get on the plane, enjoy a meal at 40.000 feet and get off? That’s UX.
While we are used to talk and think about Design and UX in our online, connected world, we sometimes forget that they also apply to the offline world, to physical experiences.
But let’s get back to design.
If you have some time, I recommend watching the show “Abstract: The Art of Design” on Netflix. It gives you a broad view of how Design is really everywhere through a variety of disciplines.
Design and Good Design
Of course everything is designed. But to paraphrase Brian Reed, “few things are designed well”.
So what’s a good design?
According to german industrial designer Dieter Rams, there are 10 principles for good design:
Good design is innovative
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
Good design makes a product useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good design is aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good design makes a product understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good design is unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
Good design is honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Good design is long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
Good design is environmentally-friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good design is as little design as possible
Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.
If we talk about User Interface Design, we can think of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design:
Visibility of system status
The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.
Match between system and the real world
The design should speak the users’ language. Use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than internal jargon. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
User control and freedom
Users often perform actions by mistake. They need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted action without having to go through an extended process.
Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.
Error prevention
Good error messages are important, but the best designs carefully prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions, or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making elements, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Information required to use the design (e.g. field labels or menu items) should be visible or easily retrievable when needed.
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Shortcuts — hidden from novice users — may speed up the interaction for the expert user so that the design can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Interfaces should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Help and documentation
It’s best if the system doesn’t need any additional explanation. However, it may be necessary to provide documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks.
I always found those principles a good starting point when creating a design or evaluating the quality of a design. But it doesn’t mean you have to follow all the rules to have a good design nor checking all the boxes will automatically qualify your work as a good design. It really depends on what you want to achieve and what experience you want to give to your users.
There’s an experiment I like when I think about Design and Good Design.
If you already tried to park your car in a street of the United States, you know that it’s really painful to understand these parking signs. Can I park? Is it free? What day is today? What time is it?
In 2010, Product Designer Nikki Sylianteng started an experiment to rethink and redesign the parking sign to simplify the life of drivers (and get less tickets).
Another example of how Good Design can avoid mistakes is the story of the Hawaiian Missile Alert related in this article of NNgroup.
One day, someone pushed the wrong button and sent a real missile alert in Hawaii instead of a test alert. At first, everyone blamed the employee for erring twice. But if you look closer at how the interface was designed, at how all the options looks the same, at how there’s was no confirmation or something to undo the action, you come to the conclusion that the design of the interface was to blame, not the human.
Why is Good Design important?
Because good design conveys clarity and simplicity.
If users find your product clear and simple to use, if they find your product intuitive and don’t need a week of training to understand it all, it means autonomous users, less calls to your customer success team and more time to improve your product.
If your users feel safe and secure when connecting for the first time, because everything is aligned, well organized, because everything is clear, you will have won their trust.
Resolving problems in the development phase costs 10 times as much as fixing them in design. This cost blows out to 100 times as much if you’re trying to fix the problem in a product that’s already been released.
Because good design conveys consistency.
If the user experience is quite the same on every page, if, for instance, filtering a list is the same wherever your users are, if they are sure to find this particular action button at this place on this page because it’s already at this place on this other page so you will have automatically created usage habits and reduced their cognitive load. They don’t even have to think about it, everything will be obvious to them.
Every dollar spent on UX brings in between $2 and $100 dollars in return.
https://www.fastcompany.com/1669283/dollars-and-sense-the-business-case-for-investing-in-ui-design
Because good design conveys transparency
A way to build trust with your users is to be transparent. If your users know what’s happening whenever they need it, if they are well informed about why they should do this and that, they will trust you. If they are wrong, you should explain why and give them keys to correct. If you are wrong, you should explain why and give them proofs that you are doing your best to fix the error.
First impressions are 94% design-related.
Judgments on website credibility are 75% based on a website’s overall aesthetics.
https://www.toptal.com/designers/ux/ux-statistics-insights-infographic
Design at the age of AI
Is good design still as important as it was before the rise of Generative AI? We can agree with that when we see that some of the most famous products have a minimal UI like ChatGPT or not their own user interface like Midjourney. And for good reason. After all, the user can only do one thing: type text to get a result. It’s more a conversation or a command than a “real interaction” (as a click for instance) on a user interface.
But Generative AI introduced a new interaction paradigm as stated by Jakob Nielsen last year: Intent-Based Outcome Specification.
With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want.
With this new paradigm in mind, a small team at IBM started to develop new design principles for Generative AI applications:
- Design Responsibly
- Design for Mental Models
- Design for Appropriate Trust & Reliance
- Design for Generative Variability
- Design for Co-Creation
- Design for Imperfection
You’ll find their research and a few strategies on how to implement them in this great article that I recommend you to read.
If you go beyond like Rachel Kobetz, Chief Design Officer at PayPal, did in her article “Decoding The Future: The Evolution Of Intelligent Interfaces”, the future of interfaces won’t be only about clicking on a button anymore. Instead, it will be a smart combination of text and visuals, voice and touch interaction, something that will adapt to a specific situation or anticipate your specific needs, something that will be immersive (AR, VR) and allow for more natural interactions.
And for all of this, we will still need design, good design.
What do you think?
