Designing Intentionally

There’s more to design than just making things look good

Designers are problem solvers. Whether we’re working on an illustration, website, app, video, or any other field of design, our goal is to create a beneficial experience for people. Though beautiful visuals play a key role in the creation of this experience, it’s a bit more complex than that. We need to truly understand what we’re designing, who we’re designing it for, and think through the details with these things in mind. We need to design intentionally. Buckle up — below are some tips I’ve found to help in this process.

Slow That Brain Down

We all have biases and expectations for how things should be. There’s even a UX design law about it. Look at the majority of websites on the internet — a top bar with a logo and links, a left column with navigation links, and only freedom to represent items in the main area. Yes, this does have its place because it’s familiar to many users, but does that make it the best design?

Our “normal” is unique to us, and the way we expect websites to look and feel is unique to us. As designers, it’s important to set these expectations aside when facing a decision. Turning off this automatic part of the brain, slowing down, and truly thinking about what best solves the problems for users is key.

For example, Apple’s homepage has a list of its products along the top, large descriptive images, and various text sizes because its goal is to help users learn more (and, yeah, buy) their products. Google’s homepage, on the other hand uses a large search box in the middle of the screen, because it aims to help users quickly and easily search the internet. Yes, there are other helpful links throughout the page, but they’re definitely overshadowed by the search bar.

So, yes, for a lot of websites, following the pattern that most people are accustomed to could work. But not always. Truly think about what’s best for your people.

Know Your People

And how do you know what’s truly best for your people? You need to 100% whole-heartedly, without any doubts or suspicions, know who you’re designing for. This doesn’t mean broadly defining a person. For example, at BoilerMake, we’re not designing for a computer science student in college who eats ramen and procrastinates doing their homework. Instead, we’re designing an experience for Jim:

Jim is a first-year CS student who has never attended a hackathon. He never touched a line of code before coming to college, but he’s excited by the possibilities coding has to offer. He’s about halfway through his first semester in college, so he has a little understanding of the basics of coding. He’s nervous to attend a hackathon — he’s never been to one, but he really wants to meet people and learn how to create an iOS app. Admittedly, working straight through the 36 hours is intimidating. He needs to rest his brain every now and then, maybe get some sleep, and maintain somewhat acceptable hygiene. More than anything, he wants to walk away from the weekend with fond memories of his time hacking.

Being specific, empathizing, and truly getting to know who you are designing for is crucial for designing with intentionality. That description certainly isn’t perfect; designers need to dig past the superficial needs of their users and get to know their deeper, more nuanced, actual problems. A great experience is a seamless experience, so removing work and simplifying every process goes a long way.

Believe it or not, the trash cans at Disneyland are a great example of this. While designing Disneyland in California, Walt Disney wanted the parks to be clean. This meant ensuring garbage made it into the trash can, they didn’t reek of nasty garbage smell, and they were easily able to be emptied. To learn more about his guests — and to truly solve their problem — Walt sat on a bench and counted the number of steps guests took before needing a trash can. He learned that the average guest needed one about every 30 feet. To this day, if you go to a Disney park, you’ll find always find a trash can within 30 feet of you.

Walt had a goal that he was trying to achieve — a clean, friendly park — so he analyzed his guests to learn about their habits and what they need. He created a solution that was most beneficial to them to make their experience great — even though that experience was literally just throwing away trash.

Make it Personal

With that being said, designing intentionally also means adding a personal touch. Whether that be through text, visuals, or any number of additional design elements, we want to add our personal touch. People don’t want to use websites, wear shirts, or look at posters that look like they were designed by a robot. We are people designing for people, and people have feelings and emotions! Colors, illustrations, motions, and text all make people feel things. We want to use our personalities as designers, in addition to the numerous other factors associated with the complexities of design and emotion that I’m not going to get into now, to help people feel great while using our creations. Or whatever other feeling we want them to have.

I think the Carrot weather app is a great example of this. It takes the monotony of a weather app and personalizes is with cute (read as: sometimes rather dark and gruesome) illustrations and phrases. As I checked the weather this morning, I was greeted with a pleasant forecast and the warm reminder that “It may be cloudy now, but look on the bright side: you could be dead.” How nice!

In other words, I doubt this app is everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s regularly one of the most downloaded weather apps on the AppStore. It certainly has the best experience of any that I’ve used. Its developer knew who they were designing for — the ungodly number of people with a dark sense of humor — and personalized it with their own twist.

Simply Everything

But! Most importantly! Every experience should be simple. da Vinci summarized this well: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Is every button necessary? Does every step in an action, visual on display, or word in a title add to the overall appeal or experience? Can an action be completed once and never repeated? Are too many things shoved onto a canvas? Keeping things simple allows us, as designers, to have a razor-sharp focus on the actual problems we’re trying to solve and the experiences we’re trying to create.

In Summary

I’ll be the first to admit that this is a lot to think about as we design. When it comes down to it, we’re really just trying to design the best experience we can for people, no matter what we’re designing. To stay sane, this is a small list of questions that I ask myself while working on projects:

User Experience Design

1. What action do I want the user to take?
2. How can I structure the page to help the user do this?
3. Is every step in this user flow necessary? Can I remove any?
4. What edge cases exist? By designing for this edge case, am I more likely to solve the problems of all users?
5. Is this design accessible? i.e. are call-to-actions noticeable, regardless of color? Are error states represented?

Visual Design

1. What emotion am I trying to convey?
2. How can I use color to lead a viewer’s eye to where I want it to go?
3. Is this design accessible? i.e. does it have enough contrast, large enough font, or color choices viewable by everyone?
4. How can the visual style affect how people feel about the design?
5. Is this too noisy or distracting? Can I remove anything?

This is an article written as on-boarding documentation for the design team at BoilerMake, Purdue’s annual hackathon. It is intended to act as an introduction to the topic of designing intentionally. I’m certain there’s more that can be said, so any and all feedback is greatly appreciated! 😄

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