Prescriptions & Principles
Moving from cognition & implementation to understanding & application
I’m a HUGE fan of design systems. Since before it was cool, I’ve fought for them, designed them, and evangelized them because they made so much sense for everyone involved.
And yet.
Confession:
I’ve struggled with Material Design ever since it came out. And every other Human-Interface Guideline (HIG) for that matter. Not because they don’t make sense, they’re too restrictive, or lack reasonable application. My discomfort’s more about how they tend to be evangelized & applied. It was more dogmatic than philosophical, and I’m (obviously) not the only frustrated one:
‘”We spent two years telling people ‘this is how to make Material yours,’” Duarte says, “and it didn’t work.” But he doesn’t blame developers. The problem is that Google didn’t provide the right tools. Specifically, he believes Google’s guidelines didn’t separate out the styling of the button from its function. Google wants apps to work like other Material Design apps, but it never meant for all Android apps to look like each other.’ — The Verge
Even the article’s sub-head — “Material design is now open to interpretation”—gets at the disconnect: it was always open to interpretation by way of principle, but interpretation is difficult. So teams tended to play the music that was in front of them.
Playing the music
This all reminds me (by no means a music historian or expert) of a couple concepts found in music: grace notes and jazz. For years (and even still), the quality of a musician is defined by how well they can play a piece of music.
Each is a different approach to humanizing, democratizing, and asserting oneself into a piece of music. Still another example is (brought to mind by the fantastic Seth Godin in The Regular Kind) the many composer-defined differences in the The First Four Notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
For product designers, HIGs are the written music: “We are the creators of this system, and here’s how you should play it.” The subtext is about maintaining the beautiful wonder of a system they’ve created to their advantage—not necessarily yours; they want their system to be the hero, not your product. Furthermore, they’ve accounted for your audience and product only as it fits into their larger sets, which means they’ve (necessarily and to their credit!) left some things out because they have many more use cases to address. And for you, this means opportunity to be different. To be different and effective, though, you’ve got to understand the music theory.
One of my favorite examples of this is a video in which mandolin genius Chris Thile talks of Bach playing bluegrass music. Which, at first is preposterous & arrogant: bluegrass was a couple hundred years after Bach.
But because Thile understands music, Bach, and the thinnest of ties that bind the atoms between them, he gets the theory, makes connections, and breaks the rules other musicians live by. He’s able to challenge the liminal boundaries that hold back other musicians.
Conceptually, this isn’t limited to music, either: find similar examples in construction (IKEA & master craftsmen), the kitchen, etc.
Breaking the dependency
HIGs are widely used because they’re generally well-researched & well-documented; they’re a sort of algorithm and thus, a convenient abdication of responsibility. And genuinely, there are really good uses for & applications of HIGs. Importantly, I’m not arguing against them, but against their rigid interpretation & implementation out of fear & expediency.
One of the reasons that I’m convinced that Material Design caught on so quickly and grown well is that it was an abdication that worked well, was implemented easily, and looked good. It satisfied the Design/Technology/Business Triumvirate (which is another post I’m working on) well enough to be reasonably widely adopted.
But as Google has found, it created an undesirably homogenous atmosphere. When it’s a risky move to move beyond a prescription (absence of responsibility) into principles (interpretation & accountability), we’re not going to see much differentiation.
HIGs are fundamentally prescriptive, based on a limited set of data and intended for a limited set of future expectations; they have a defined and necessarily limited context. It’s important to realize, though, that high-level direction can only account for so many permutations, situations, and contexts: they can only be so forward-looking and accurate.
Which is why, in order for a product to stand out, one must understand the principles in play. But how?
- Dig deeper. Challenge the guidelines in ways that can help you understand why those guidelines exist. The people who made them did so for good reasons and those reasons often lead to greater opportunity than the guidelines let on. It’ll probably make you a better overall product person, too.
- Talk with humans that use the product or live in its space. Find out where your audience might have needs that aren’t best-suited with by-the-book implementations.
- Play the gaps to your advantage. HIGs necessarily can’t cover all products & audiences equally well. Once you understand the guidelines and your particular audience, you can find an area to own.
- Employ the systems where it makes sense. You’ll save yourself a lot of headache, effort, time, and deliberation by not reinventing the wheel for everything.
- Promote spiritual alignment between your own decisions to fill the gaps and the broader system. Even when you’re working beyond the HIG, make sure you don’t reinvent your own wheel over and over again. Look for an 80/20 set that works for your context: the system (HIG+your own guidelines) to do 80% of the work so that you can give 80% of your attention to the 20% of situations that aren’t addressed by the system or that can disproportionately benefit from additional consideration.
Seriously, you can do it! It’s hard work, but it’s worthy work.
