What makes great design

What makes great design? I’m not just talking the aesthetics of it. Great design goes far beyond the color scheme, the font, the formatting of objects, even the whole look of the app in general. The most important key in great design is getting the user to feel like they’re in control. If you hand your product to anyone and they immediately start interacting with it, almost to the point of it seeming like they’ve been using it for months, then you’ve created a beautifully designed app. Let’s delve into this a bit more.

“Reddit has bad design. . .it looks so ugly”. This is wrong, on so many levels. Reddit might actually be the most well designed site among a lot of social media sites. Why? Well, on the “front page” you’re immediately immersed into their content — but the information you see there is neatly crafted to the point where the user knows exactly where to look if they want to progress through the site. The format of the feed seems familiar, so they know what they have to do to interact with it; the buttons are the default style you see on html docs so you know what to click to move forward. Images are a lot more appealing to the eye than text, so your eyes are immediately drawn to it as you scroll through the content. The buttons are extremely simple too — just bolded text set upon a lighter background. There’s no complex UI the user has to interact with. Everything just makes sense. It’s simple.

Yes, simplicity is the key when it comes to great design. Something that’s so simple to use, and allows the user to interact with the product in a natural way. Think about it, why did Google succeed while Yahoo, Bing, etc. failed? At this point, Google and Yahoo return pretty much the same results in the same amount of time. So why is it that Google is the go to page? Just look at their damn homepage. It only asks you to do 1 things: enter in something to search. There’s nothing else there to distract you. And it makes sense too: “I went to google to search for something and the only thing they let me do is search”…duh. Thus, if I ever think of anything I want to look up, I just google it. What the site asks for and what the user want compliment one another perfectly. Yahoo on the other hand is chaotic mess. If I go to Yahoo, I have a billion options to choose from. Ranging from searching the web, to looking at the weather, to reading political news, etc. But they never defined 1 key thing for me to do. There’s no need Yahoo is solving of mine. I don’t need it. My point: focus on simplicity. Focus on just one thing, so the user knows to go to use your product whenever they want to accomplish something.

If you’ve built that, then designing it aesthetically is stupid simple. Design the product in such a way that the user can accomplish what they’re looking for in the FASTEST and most OBVIOUS way possible. Once you’ve finalized that, delete everything else. And I mean everything. Again, let’s look at google. The Google logo serves for brand identity, the textbox tells me where to type, and the “Search” button tells me what I have to click. After I type in my query and search, it reloads the page with the results instantaneously. No fancy animations were required to do this. It’s simple, and therefore beautiful.

This is not to say you shouldn’t use animations. Animations are great — as long as they’re used as a tool to help the user do what they’re doing even better. If your animation helps guide me from point A to point B, and isn’t intrusive, then you should definitely use it. If the animation explains something that could replace written text (which is ugly) or explains something to me (like how the passcode lock on iPhone shakes when you enter in the wrong passcode) then it’s great to have. But if you’re adding in animations just for the sake of “looking cool”, then that’s just stupid. No one ever will come to your app because of “how cool” your animation is. Exceptional UI is brilliant only when it helps the product better be used as a tool.