Love the design process, hate the pixels
Working in the design field is a wonderful thing, for many reasons. One of them is that we can make things work and feel better, like turning complicated actions into a simple tap or refreshing content with a simple gesture.
Nowadays design is becoming more unified and more consistent, at least compared with what was happening in the past years, when everything was just a fiasco.
Today we have this “new” awesome thing called user patterns, that should provide guidance in the design process. They should but they are still not good enough.
Why?
One answer could be that both Google and Apple have different opinions in terms of what’s better for the user. Which is a bit odd since they have different solutions for the same users.
Now here’s a funny quote from Don Norman:
They began shipping systems that people have difficulty learning and using, getting away with it because people don’t recognize such problems until it is too late, and money has already changed hands. Even then, people tend to blame themselves for the shortcomings of their devices: “If I weren’t so stupid . . . !”
What would Persona A, B or C do?
Understanding what is good for the user is hard. It really is. Think of the simplest application and then think how will people use it.
How will european, how will asian, left handed or color blind people use it? What about kids, older people and so on. Doesn’t sound that easy anymore,does it?
So if big companies aren’t able to get this right, think of all the small companies or freelance designers. As long as they have to rely on instinct or professional experience of what a good experience is, we might as well call this a Russian design roulette.
The pixels
The reality is that we have this trend right now in design where everything is about making a design pop (just for fun, let’s call this the Pop Era of Design). While this is useful for junior designers (they get to improve their visual skills and have a better understanding of shapes, colors, consistency, typography etc.), this is, unfortunately, useless to the other parts of design.
Each morning I look over new dribbble shots and think “Hey, this are some nice pixels or a great looking interface”
After that a funny thought comes to my mind. Let’s add a scenarion and some real assets to them.
Spoiler alert: the design is useless and pretty.
Think of it like this:
You go to the bank to take out some money. The bank is nice, has gradients and drop shadows and everything looks really consistent.
You go and insert your card in the ATM and you see it requires you to enter a 5 digit PIN. But you have a 4 digit PIN.
And then you see this nice people at the bank, nicely dressed, clean strokes, and they seem so friendly, but they speak only Chinese.
10 minutes later, how do you feel about this bank?
Now imagine thousand of designers creating this kind of products.
Do you still love designing?
You should. Whenever you find a product that fits your need, and you can rely on it, think of all the effort that was made to make it work just like that.
Delivering a good experience requires ideation, prototyping, testing, iterating, testing, designing and redesigning, testing, validating, developing, testing and, in the end, if everything looks nice and validated gets out there in your hands.
…
Well, almost.
Unless there is a business requirement missing or the business value of the feature has changed.
Originally published at www.mece.ro on January 5, 2016.
