Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler
To start…
this book is very broad. It covers 125 different design principles over 263 pages. The principles range from really basic ideas such as color or errors and ranges to the complex, for example, Flexibility-Usability Tradeoff. The book is a little old, originally published in 2003 and reissued in 2010, but the principles are timeless and are still applicable. The layout is nice, each page contains a series of paragraphs accompanied by images and diagrams on the opposite page to further explain each principle. Because there are so many different topics covered, I am going to pick out a few that I think apply best to app design.
Iteration
First of all, something that has been brought up a lot in our class, iteration. The book defines iteration as “a process of repeating a set of operations until a specific result is achieved.” It describes that itereation in design allows for complex structures to be created using exploring testing and tuning of the design. It then discusses two basic forms of iteration; design and development. Design iteration is “the expected iteration that occurs when exploring, testing and refining design concepts.” It talks about how user testing must happen during design iteration in order to find out the target audiences needs. Development iteration is “the unexpected iteration that occurs when building a product.” It is rework, and is a waste of time and rescources that can be costly. This is not ideal and normally comes from incorrect design specifications.
Prototyping
Going off of iteration, another helpful principle for app design is prototyping. This goes along with the “fail fast” mentality. The book defines prototyping as “the use of simplified and incomplete models of a design to explore ideas, elaborate requirements, refine specifications and test functionality.” The book outlines a few types; throwaway, evolutionary, and concept.
Concept prototypes are used for preliminary designs quickly and inexpensively. Examples are storyboards and sketches. Throwaway prototypes are discarded once the needed information is obtained to proceed to the next prototype. An example is a model of a car used to perfect the final products aerodynamic properties. Evolutionary prototypes are those than can continuously change and potentially form into the final product. “Design requirements and specifications never define a final product, but merely the next iteration of the design.”
Aesthetic Usability
The Aesthetic Usability principle “describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs.” This is the case whether they are easier to use or not. They go on to say that this is because there is more of a sense of forgiveness with aesthetically pleasing designs. People are more likely to look past issues and feel a sense of joy along with greater patience when using the product. The examples they use for this show the age of the book. They say that the Nokia phones which added color shells along with TiVo had aesthetically pleasing design which helped users look past issues with the products. This applies to apps in the way that although you should focus on the design of how your app works and accomplishes a goal, if the app is not aesthetically pleasing, the user could discontinue to use it more easily when faced with issues.
There are many more principles in the book, not all of which apply to app design specifically but all of which are helpful to know as a designer. Some key principles that do relate to app design are: Life Cycle, Mapping, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, Performance Load, Performance vs Preference, Personas, Prototyping, Ockham’s Razor, and Scaling Fallacy.
In conclusion…
Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book. It shed some more light on things I have already learned and introduced some new, helpful concepts to me. The format of it did get a little repetitive and made it difficult to read for extended periods of time and occasionally read more like an introduction to psychology textbook. It definitely is something that could be used more as a reference tool as I will be using it in the future. I really wish this book were written within the last year as well. The outdated examples are forgivable and don’t detract from the overall readability, but reading about how these apply to smart phones, apps, and the current state of the internet would be really interesting.
