5 Lessons I’ve Learned About Experience Design
As a designer, I’ve learned lessons from the pro’s, failures, and successes. Here’s a few things I‘ve learned and remind myself to be aware of while I’m designing experiences for any medium.
Stay Simple
What is simplicity?
Simplicity (n) is
- freedom from complexity, intricacy, or division into parts.
- absence of pretentiousness or ornament
- directness of expressions
Simplicity is the process of taking away the extraneous information thus letting the useful information shine. Stay simple and keep asking questions, you’ll be able to deliver valuable experiences to your customers.
Simplicity creates habit. We are truly creatures of habit. Everyone has their routines — from the gym, dinner, work, school, etc. Not only that, but we are relatively loyal and tend to alight our lives with brands we like. Humans are hard to forget a when a brand lets them down. With such high stakes, a free market is created and allows for competition among professionals — many times helping and promoting innovation.
Jony Ive has said the first step in achieving simplicity is to go deep. You have to truly understand what’s at the core of your product, you have to understand who you are designing for and why you’re designing it.
Sketch, Sketch, Sketch
I learned this the hard way a few times this semester by jumping the gun into computer design instead of sketching out multiple ideas. This got me in trouble. If you jump to the computer, you’re limited by what you know how to do at that moment and your designs suffer from that. Sketching isn’t a waste of time, but a massive time-saver.
I slowly began understand the value that sketching could offer to my designs. No one forced me. I gained a deeper appreciation for it by realizing how much time I was wasting trying to figure out what I wanted designs to look like on the computer, not flesh and bones of functionality and flow. Sketching allows us to get to better designs, sooner.
First, the first idea is rarely your best. And you must iterate. Brainstorming ideas and talking about functionality is great, but seeing is believing! Sketch it out! It only takes a few seconds, and it gets the idea out of your head and onto the paper. Now think about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and what you could improve and sketch some more ideas. Sometimes your first idea is the best idea, but you must explore others.
Second, sketching is fast and rough, so you can get a lot of ideas down very quickly saving you time and a lot of headaches. It really comes down to separating the concepts from the details. It’s natural for clients and users to focus on the wrong details in a design such as a color or line weight, but a low fidelity sketch can help separate content from branding elements.
Great Design is Silent
Great design is silent. Great design is simple enough, it disappears into the background. The best work is not work that appears to be manufactured or designed, but rather fits into our lifestyles and seamlessly becomes part of our identity. Think about it this way, you’re not going to be able to explain your designs when they’re out in the real world, but rather you will have to catch your consumers attention in a matter of a few seconds, and offer value, real vale.
Design is incredibly important to what your branding looks like, how it feels and what emotions are tied to it, and how people feel when they interact with a brand. Design is the heart and soul of how your brand lives in the world. By adhering to company guidelines and design standards, companies can create memorable experiences that provide immediate value, not relying on a huge learning curve or complex systems.
Material and Human Interface Guidelines are your bible.
Experiences with Google and Apple center around product interfaces. These experiences involve interactions with physical products of metal and plastic with hard-drives, microphones and keyboards. But experiences at Google and Apple involve significantly more that interactions with physical products made of pixels, like any of the apps you use. Those pixels create our experience and represent the brand.
Material Design and the Human Interface Guidelines don’t just create order and standards, but help create order with purpose and meaning. It’s a expression and extension of Google and Apple’s brand and visual representation of their operating systems. UX and UI work depends on consistency of brand and in functionality, so creating as system for designers to build off allows designers and developers to make better design decisions for each operating system.
Build It and Test It.
As these systems are built, it’s important to take your creations off the screen and into real life. Assumptions are idea killers, so the faster you can get past your assumptions and test them, the faster you can validate concepts and adjust functionality to be useful. Getting down and dirty with the technology, functionality, and design of your product allows you to understand unique intricacies that could turn into actionable insight for design decisions. Build it, test it, and repeat. This is the only way to make products that provide lasting value to customers by creating living technological solutions to solve real problems.
“Experience design is all about fostering meaningful connections between the user and the world they live in,” says Gabrielle Williams, the creator of Budgie. “There are many ways to define a successful experience, but if someone steps away from an experience and it was memorable in a positive way or enabled them achieve a goal in some capacity, it’s safe to say it improved their life.”
Design has the ability to solve real problems if we seek it out. Design has the ability to improve and change our lives for better or worse. As new technologies come out and new systems are being designed, our job as multi-media experience designers is to use these technologies for good creating experiences that add value to our lives everyday. Successful design is habitual design, so let’s continue to build products that humans need.
