When You Understand Good Design, It IS the “Secret Sauce”
This week at Transpose headquarters, we’ve been talking a lot about Slack(and their sauce). Who hasn’t, honestly? For those not already in the know, there’s an interesting conversation taking place on Medium about how Slack managed to achieve astronomical, almost overnight success in an overcrowded market. Starting out as an internal communications tool to aid in the development of a now-defunct online game, the company now boasts a $2.8 billion dollar valuation, and everyone wants to know how that happened.
If you ask Andrew Wilkinson (founder of MetaLab, the design agency responsible for polishing up Slack’s interface), Slack succeeded thanks to the look and feel of the product. Slack looks like fun and feels like fun and as a result, people are happy to use it. In his words,
“Slack acts like your wise-cracking robot sidekick, instead of the boring enterprise chat tool it would otherwise be.”
In this explanation, the design of a product functions as the self-proclaimed “secret sauce.” This is something we love about the Slack story — no one knew they wanted a fun and engaging work chat app until they saw one. Once they did, it turned out that making an app fun and engaging made all the difference.
This analysis has come under recent (light, moderate, and respectful) fire from Dropbox’s Matt Bond (formerly Atlassian), who claims that, while it’s important, there’s no way design can make or break a product (“here’s the thing — a lot of nicely designed products never take off or get noticed. Good design is not enough”). So, is design the secret sauce?
We think that the answer to the ‘secret sauce’ question depends largely on what you mean by good design. We think design is the secret sauce when it’s applied to a good product. From our own CCO, Skyler Johnson-Wagner:
“you can’t have a good product with bad design, because design is a core element of what makes a good product”
So, when you understand design to be much more than gilding, design is very much the secret sauce (if not the entire sandwich). Here’s why.
Good design is puzzle-solving
Good design isn’t just about making something look nice; it’s also about communicating information in the best possible way. Understandably, this means that the more complicated, abstract, flexible, or powerful your product is, the more difficult it’s going to be to execute really nice design. This means that part of the challenge of executing good design is finding a way to translate big, abstract concepts into concrete, intelligible actions — and make them seem easy.
Here, it’s helpful to consider the difference between simplicity and elegance. Here’s the thing: a simple thing will always be simple. Because of that, it will always be easy to fashion a simple explanation of a simple product. Elegance requires taking a complex, powerful (potentially confusing) thing and making it seem simple (thank you, Bucky Fuller). Take our interface, for example. What you have here are a dozen moving parts and countless ways to access, manage, share, and search various data sets. The possibility space is dizzyingly vast, so making it look and feel easy to use requires taking the product’s inherent complexity, metabolizing it, and displaying it in a clean, weightless way:
This difficult but crucial step determines whether or not anyone understands your product and whether or not they’re capable of engaging with it.
Good design reduces friction
When a product is well-designed, it should perform better. This means eliminating any element that might prevent a user from doing her job (asking her to make unnecessary decisions, showing her irrelevant functions, or cluttering her dashboard). Turns out, there are a lot of friction-y ways to mess up a user interaction. This is something that could easily happen for a very versatile, powerful product because people are easily overwhelmed by choice. So, making a product feel easy to use requires refusing to show them everything they can do with it all at once.
This is what a typical entry looks like on our platform (this one happens to be an entry for a Client Contact List):
The interface was built in such a way that there isn’t anything here that shouldn’t be here, and that was an intentional choice on our part because we don’t want our users confronting decisions they don’t need to make. In this respect, we think that a lot of the decisions that end up delivering good design are decisions about what not to say. In other words…
Good design is quiet
Technology should only be presenting you with information when you need it. Put differently, there’s a sense in which truly good design is invisible because it’s not intruding on your experience, only helping you go about living it. Here’s a famous example of calm design: Take an ordinary teakettle. It notifies you when your water is ready, and otherwise you can safely ignore it. Point being, when technology is done well, it’s something you can spend most of your time ignoring.
Here’s another example. Any entry you create for a given template on our platform has a whole host of actions you can perform. This is at once a good thing (because it means that there are a ton of things you can do to individual entries) and a bad thing (because we don’t want users to have to look at the full array of note actions all the time. Our design problem here is how to show you that you can do all of this…
…while still presenting you with a clean interface. Our solution was to make note actions accessible, but politely so. If you take a look at the following example of our Kanban view, you’ll see that there are a couple different projects on the board. Each one holds the potential to perform one of several actions (but again, those are seven different decisions that users don’t need to be making all the goddam time).
Rather than make all these actions explicit, we made it so that once your mouse hovers over a particular project, you’re presented with the option of opening an Actions dropdown, which then unleashes all the potential for your project.
This way, we found a way to present our users with the information they need but only when they need it.
Good design should lower your cognitive load
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental energy a user must spend on accomplishing a given task or engaging with an interface. Interfaces that require a lot of heavy lifting (mentally speaking) tend to feel laborious (because they are). In short, high cognitive load = unhappy users; low cognitive load = this interface might have a chance of feeling like fun. One of the ways we accomplished minimal cognitive load is by giving our users options with respect to how they want to view their information.
Above, you saw an example of our Kanban view. Our platform also allows you to view your information as a calendar:
As a table:
Or, as a compact collection:
Allowing users to select the way they view their information means that it’s optimized for however they want to use that information. It also means that users don’t have to encounter extraneous garbage because the view they’ve selected weeds out everything they don’t want to see. Each view is good for a particular kind of task, and each suits their task very well because they understand that some information is going to be more important than other information (and then it shows you only what you need to see).
In this sense, our platform exhibits good design because it’s taking a powerful product and turning what could have been a noisy, heavy, mentally exhausting experience into a calm, weightless one. The next wave of tech is going to be decided largely by user acceptance, and good design drives user experience. It’s time for businesses in general (and tech in particular) to sit up and take note.
Questions or comments? Want to fight about it? Find us on Facebook, Twitter, or get at us at support@transpose.com. Cheers!
