Good design is iterative
There is no better way to start this topic than with the quote from the legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams, whose works for Braun & Vitsoe are eternal.
“Good design is as little design as possible”
Probably the most used quote on design, but worth mentioning it any number of times, because it sums it all nice.
Everything we experience around us is designed. You bike to work and ride on the left side, stop for signal or you signal to others before you stop. Every bit of this is designed, designed to make transportation safe and smooth. Any courses of action devised to change an existing situation into a preferred one are supposedly called as designed and anyone devising those actions is a designer.
When everyone is innately a designer and everything we experience is designed, how do we perceive what is good?
Before double-clicking on what a good design stands for, a quick moment to delve deep into how the perception of something as good or bad happens in one’s mind. The first and the foremost is that our perception is very subliminal and happens in a fraction of seconds after exposure to a given experience.
Every instance designed experience interfaces with its intended user, the first question to get asked is “Is this experience relevant for the given context?” You are about to check out your favourite main course for dinner and there you get suggestions for an intriguing dessert which you find it hard from stopping yourselves from ordering. Since the experience of getting suggestions for desserts is relevant to ordering the main course, the experience is perceived as valuable. It helps you get closer to the goal of satisfying your hunger. On the contrary, if the recommendation is about upgrading to a membership plan, you feel it as not so relevant to your current context. Hence the perceived value of the experience is low.
“Efficacy of a design solution is directly proportional to its relevancy”
So the primary determining factor for perceiving the value of a design is its relevance to the context in which it is experienced. When the right information is delivered in the right time, to the right user and in the right context more than 50% of the users will inevitably give their undivided attention, while more than 25% actively interact with it.
The context may be apt for the user, but what about attention and engagement? Our brain receives 11 million bits of information per second, yet we consciously process less than 50 bits. What gets into those 50 bits out of the 11 million is largely dependent on the motivations at that moment.
The part of the human brain that gets activated while focussing on attention-demanding tasks is the task-positive network. Enterprise users in 100% of their time on the product, do certain tasks to meet specific goals. Experiences designed for an enterprise product user primarily caters to the task-positive network. The level of motivation is very high, which results in increased attention and engagement.
Outside of enterprise experience, not all interactions from a user are directed towards specific goals and tasks. Many times users casually explore the experience, especially in social apps and a bunch of consumer products. This type of wandering in the wild caters to the task-negative network. Invoking user attention and engagement could only be possible through an understanding of their expectations, likes/dislikes, predispositions and bias. The likelihood of a user engaging with a notification from a movie booking app is very high only when it is presented at the appropriate time of the day and the day of the week which is in synch with the general expectations of a typical target user persona or could also possibly a learned one from the pattern of booking in the past.
When a user is motivated for reaching a goal or performing a task, there is an expectation. Understanding their expectations in a given moment in advance greatly help to invoke the right user behaviour. Failure to do so often leads to a situation where a user is presented with an experience not expected at that moment thereby completely missing it altogether. A psychological phenomenon called inattentional blindness, known famously by the Invisible Gorilla Study.
The design is relevant to the context it is experienced, it meets what is expected out of it, yet how it is perceived may vary largely from user to user. Why? Because it is to do with how memory works.
Only 2% of the entire body mass, but the human brain consumes almost 20% of total energy intake. Hence by evolution, our brain is wired in a way that it is optimised for efficient use of energy. Processing only 50 bits of 11 million bits of information…. This is exactly the reason. For the very reason, our brain relies on patterns than discrete pieces of information. We think we store what we experience in exact details as is in our memory, but in reality, we store our interpretations of the experiences. When interpreting a given experience the memory takes into account the things that got our attention and leave the rest in the background. Hence whenever there happens a change to any aspect in the background or to those elements that didn’t bother to get our attention we fail to recognise it. This is called change blindness. Probably you can relate to this event of you engrossed in a movie when your friend points out a deliberate continuity error which you overlooked, where the main actor is seen entering the scene with a bruise on his face and in the closeup shot of the same scene he looks clean and the bruise simply disappeared.
Our perceptions are triggered by context, directed by our motivations and coloured by our memories.
We find it easier to perceive experiences which are familiar because it instantly matches a pattern already stored in the memory, making the comprehension of the information effortless.
A good design is not only about solving a need efficiently but also to form lasting connections with users. To design product experiences of lasting connections with users it’s just not enough to ask “Will this designed solution work”. One must go beyond it to ask “Do I have enough understanding to judge whether this will work”
Research is the key to building that understanding from grounds up. While data and analytics can reveal patterns of usage, user research alone can get you the reasons behind those patterns to occur. It is paramount to have complete openness to imbibe as much information about the user, their needs, desires, challenges, motivations and their context.
“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”
- Dieter Rams
There has to be a conscious effort to remain unbiased because it’s not about finding information that confirms what is already known to you but discovering the unknowns and the unknown unknowns of the user.
This understanding of the users at the functional and emotional level strengthens gut feel that powers all those design decisions which are hard to measure with metrics. While the user is at heart of the design process, mindful of user’s mental process goes a long way in building designs that are delightful beyond being good.
Mindful of all the user’s mental process… oh Yay, we’ve got an easy way… make our user wear the MOOSE helmet (from the movie Chappie, 2015, American dystopian science fiction action film) extract the consciousness and bang… we’ve got all the details around what the user thinks, their emotions, motivations, predispositions, biases etc Use all this to accurately build a design that is great and aptly works. Hold on… we are in 2019 and the possibilities of MOOSE helmet becoming a reality and mainstream is far beyond imagination.
Until that time the best alternative is to research, understand, hypothesise, design and test. Probably it might be a 50% perfect solution. That’s great to go for it one more cycle, one more… one more… as long as the designed solution is getting better and better one pixel at a time.
“Design is never done. It evolves, evolves constantly, getting as little as it gets, eventually becoming imperceptible.”
A good design is always iterative, helping users get closer to their goals while establishing a shared understanding of the priorities, efficiencies and trade-offs, amongst the stakeholders.
Iterative design is at the heart of building the Unified Marketing Cloud platform that drives real connections to our enterprise customers of InMobi. At InMobi Design, we intend to keep things in the crudest form, anything minimal to drive across the point and establish a shared understanding. In the enterprise design world especially in the initial stages of product evolution, the challenges of doing end-to-end user testing are aplenty. Dogfooding the product experiences through our internal managed business unit teams helps get a good degree of validation before exposing it to our external users. While we iterate on our solutions, we consciously invest in enhancing the art of balancing quality and shipping time.
This article was originally published in Design4India — NASSCOM Initiative
