Thinking beyond visuals: 5 principles of invisible design
A visual experience is just the beginning of how designers can deliver better digital products
I can remember the eerie feeling…
Some mix of embarrassment and annoyance. The four words that usually bring me anxiety when someone comes to my apartment:
“What’s the Wi-fi password?”
Oh no.*Roll eyes internally*. Ok, now I will have to write the password down somewhere… and show it… and people will ask why I couldn’t come up with something funnier… it also complies with basic password safety rules… making this even harder to share. The stress!
Luckily, peace at last! Now, if my friend and I have a phone with the latest iOS, this can be easily done by pressing a single button that pops up automatically on my phone. Most of this interaction is done automatically in the background, once my phone realizes someone is trying to log into the same Wi-fi network. All I must do is click on “share password.”
This great experience mostly works in the background, mostly invisible.
It might be common to only think of a visual experience when talking about a digital product
How the buttons look, how the animations flow, and the style of the images. But how about all the other invisible parts? How about the work done to uncover and understand my problem of sharing Wi-fi passwords with friends and all the tech complexity behind the scenes to make this experience happen with a single click of a button?
Design is thinking made visual is a famous quote by Saul Bass that summarizes some of the activities of a designer. We can see this very clearly within product design as we use a vast library of visual techniques to explain an idea, a user research effort, how an app should work, and so on.
One of the keys to an outstanding experience is integrating it so well with our lives that we don’t even notice it. To achieve that, we must reduce friction between people and what they are trying to do. This friction is sometimes reduced by utilizing invisible actions that generate delight or are so good they are only noticed when they don’t work. How about an application that saves your work in the background, so you feel safe if something unexpected happens? How about accessible controls that use voice or body gestures when your hands are busy?
To go the extra mile in digital product design and take into account more than just the visual interface, we must deeply understand five main factors:
1. Having a profound understanding of the users and their mental models
How and where people do their tasks is crucial knowledge for designers that is sometimes overlooked. What are the forces that influence people’s behaviour at a specific time? Tight deadlines, noisy environment, cognitive challenges, too many distractions? What’s the actual setting this person is in? Is it at a construction site with an iPad or, at home alone or with kids and dogs running around? How do they expect something to work? Maybe they expect a smart fridge to behave like their smart lighting, or they don’t see any point in smart features at all.
Here at Alcumus, one of our main product experience principles is to put people at the heart of everything. We connect regularly with users to understand their goals and pain points, we rely on their feedback, and we strive to make our products accessible and usable for everyone. The more we understand the scenarios our users are involved with, the better we can design. After all, the end design is not for designers: it’s for those who use it.
2. Thinking beyond screens
By understanding why, where and how people interact with something, we can start thinking about improving the experience beyond visual interfaces. Product designers commonly do this by carefully creating journey maps and empathy maps with enough detail to cover aspects of people’s environment, their moods, thoughts, and what other tools are being used for a specific job.
With the situational understanding of time, place and mood, products can act differently. If you’re cooking and following a recipe in an app, perhaps the last thing you need is to touch the screen — voice, gestures and sound could deliver a better experience. If you have smart devices, they can act differently according to the time of the day, your phone’s location, voice, what’s playing on the TV, etc. It’s also important to also think about the negative effects of some of this. When is sound feedback too much? Can a user trust the voice capabilities?
As designers, we can map out how some of these interactions will play out. However, the final experience could be entirely non-visual.
3. Collaborating with stakeholders is crucial
Engineers, developers, and product owners play a big role in making experiences seamless and less screen-input-based. They are the ones that push the technology boundaries and can work on processes happening in the background — a close relationship towards a mutual goal is key. Making everyone understand the person we’re designing for empowers teams and allows innovation to happen on a bigger scale.
Another one of our experience principles is to keep it simple. We’re always looking for ways to eliminate steps for users, pre-populate fields for them, improve error messages and states, reduce cognitive load, automate as much as possible, integrate with other apps in our system… This is all somewhat invisible design, and it can only happen with close collaboration with devs, engineers, and the team as a whole. We usually don’t find the perfect solution, but the best compromise between user goals, business goals, user experience, and development resources.
4. Emotional connections: personalizing while creating trust and familiarity
It’s easier for people to adopt and enjoy using products if they foster emotional connections and have a level of familiarity. At Alcumus, we aim to be familiar. We strive to create a cohesive experience based on brand trust and patterns, so our experiences feel consistent across the board. By understanding the users, their environments and what’s feasible in terms of technology, we aim to create a familiar, almost frictionless experience. The next step from here is creating delight.
There must be a balance between functionalism and delight: The usage of design systems, the right conventions, accessible colours and patterns, and the removal of unnecessary elements play a crucial role, but it’s only by adding personalization and delight that we can take a product from great to a memorable experience.
Saving settings and work automatically, tailoring the digital environment to specific user needs, practicing anticipatory design, understanding how to save people’s time, using storytelling, and paying attention to the messages and how they are shown are all quick examples of how to deliver more value compared with other products with similar functionality. This makes it easier to stand out from the crowd and creates a better relationship between the user and the product.
5. Sustainability and accessibility
We must view sustainability as not only about the environment but also about ensuring ethical practices and designing for all possible users, as diverse as they are.
This not only includes people who have a mobility impairment, but also cognitive disabilities, young, old, tech-savvy, casual users, discriminated users, and first-time users. If we understand and effectively apply accessibility guidelines, we must consider other non-visual areas like voice-readers and eye-tracking software. Designers can make everyone feel welcome by providing an experience that accommodates every person without drawing attention to the adaptations made for specific needs.
The development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation systems also present an ethical challenge. They must align with a company’s or product’s ethical principles, accountability, and transparency.
For environmental hazards, every digital product needs physical resources to exist. We must think about the energy used to run servers and data centres. We should also be able to choose if our suppliers use renewable energy and are as efficient as they can be. We are responsible for optimizing our services and data to use the minimum amount of processing power possible.
A visual experience is just the beginning of how designers can deliver better digital products
Sometimes a non-visual experience is exactly what people need to achieve their goals and seamlessly integrate digital products into their daily routines. By understanding how users, technology, resources, politics, and sustainability play into product development, designers can go beyond screens and visual components to provide a richer experience while also being the gatekeepers for ethical, accessible and sustainable practices.
