What makes good design

What makes great design?

To a greater extent than any other creature, we humans shape the world around us to suit ourselves. Some of that shaping is unintentional, but much of it is deliberate. We create our environments by constructing buildings, roads, furnishings, and landscapes. We make our daily lives easier and more enjoyable by inventing tools, from kitchen utensils and earth-to-orbit spacecraft to social networking and enterprise-spanning IT systems. We communicate with one another in text, imagery, motion, and sound. We even attempt to craft perfect experiences in retail settings and amusement parks. This intentional shaping of the world for mass consumption is often referred to as design. 

A great design solves its users’ needs in a way that’s trustworthy, transparent, and aesthetically pleasing. While well-designed websites tend to be praised for their beauty, they are certainly more than this. They’re a marriage of form and function that’s greater than the sum of their parts. Great design is holistic. Everything from the first encounter to the last needs to be considered and contextually relevant to users to make it an enduring artifact. 

Clearly, "design" is an incredibly broad term. Does choosing what color to paint your bedroom, sculpting the exterior of a car, and planning a complex application’s technical architecture all have equal claims to the word? People outside of design professions have difficulty drawing the line, and there are so many philosophies and assumptions attached to it that even designers seldom agree on exactly what "design" is.

The average customer and user are not (usually) experts in product design. There is a deeply held belief among some usability and design professionals that users are the only experts. I would argue that users are the only experts in what their (personal) problems are. In most cases, they are seldom equipped with the expertise to solve those problems. It's a bit like the doctor-patient relationship: Patients have the best information about their symptoms and can assess whether particular treatment plans for their lifestyles, but physicians are experts in diagnosing and treating. The right solution involves the knowledge and cooperation of both parties.

A great design is one that attacks user experience from all fronts. It gets the interaction design correct, including an intuitive navigation and easy-to-learn patterns. The visual design not only makes the interactions easy to figure out, but also conveys a sense of the brand. It uses animations and moving transitions to delight the user and clarify what is happening. And, most of all, it’s fast.

All of this explains why most design books begin with some definition of the word. For the purposes of this article, at least, design is the way of visualizing concrete solutions that serve human needs and goals within certain constraints.

Visualizing concrete solutions is the essence of design. These solutions could be tangible products, such as buildings, software, consumer electronics, or advertisements, or they could be services that are intended to provide a specific sort of experience. The inherent aptitude—the drive, even—to imagine the desired end result and express it in a tangible way is what separates designers from non-designers. This doesn't mean that all designers must be good at illustration; I have known many fine designers whose drawing skills were limited. 

When people ask for feature X, it's often their way of identifying that they have a problem with how things work now; the suggested solution is sometimes workable, but a skilled designer can usually come up with a solution that's not only better, but that also suits the needs of a wide range of users. 

What designers must excel at is looking at a blank surface and filling it with believable representations of an end product so that other people can see, understand, and eventually build it. Building it of course is a separate task; designers don't build products any more than architects build houses. Instead, they provide precise instructions so that builders can focus on accomplishing the end result. 

But I have to pose the question is design is a craft because it is neither science nor art, but somewhere in between. Science is about understanding how the universe works and why it works that way. Design, while it is informed by scientific learning about human senses, cognition, and ergonomics, focuses on understanding only to the extent that it is necessary to solve the problem at hand. Art is about creating an end product that, above all, expresses the inner vision of the artist. Design is not about expressing the designer's point of view, but it is very much about creation.

In order for design to be design and not art, it must serve human needs and goals. All designed artifacts have a purpose. Good design helps humans accomplish something in an efficient, effective, safe, and enjoyable way. Designers can learn a great from fields like ergonomics and HCI (the study of human-computer interaction) to increase efficiency and minimize the potential for wasted time in the process. At the same time, designers strive to go beyond the simply functional, since pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction are also important human goals. Most people shun things that are not pleasing to their senses. So evaluating your objectives is of the utmost importance in design.

The one thing design evaluation of any kind doesn't do is generate good design. Some people expect usability testing, in particular, to be a complete solution: Prototype your best guess, test it, then keep tweaking and testing until you get it right. This is a bit like living on alcohol and cigarettes and expecting your doctor to fix you with a pill; in my humble opinion a good design is worth a year of evaluation. This is why I always advise clients with tight budgets to consider limiting testing hours in favor of more up-front research and design time. Please note however, I would never advise skipping evaluation for any product or service where a usability problem could be disastrous, such as for a medical device or vehicle interface. After all the cost of other peoples lives should never be weighed in dollars and cents.

Mind you, our definition of design still encompasses a tremendous range of intentionally created artifacts, environments, and processes—types of things humans have been designing for a hundred years or more. Surely, we ought to have this design thing figured out by now. Perhaps this would be the case if it weren't for an assortment of technologies based on silicon chips. Our increasingly digital age has added a host of new challenges that traditional design, manufacturing, and business mind-sets simply are not equipped to address.
The key is to get your users involved in creating your product. By getting feedback early, we could save ourselves enormous amounts of effort. And the important thing is that from the users’ point of view, they were fully functional, we hadn’t fully done the backend or anything, but they had a product they could feel, touch, and play with. Another part of the key was for the developers to build a framework for development

A mediocre design occurs for one or more of the following reasons: It is always in our best interest not to let technical considerations overpower human ones; you should start your user experience work early enough in the design process, that human characteristics are accounted for and not assumed as some common knowledge. Adaptability plays a factor but it can not be counted on as something that will happen regardless of the users ability to comprehend initially. 

Finally, design always happens within certain constraints. There is no such thing as unconstrained design. Unconstrained classroom exercises may teach imagination, but they do not accurately represent the problem-solving nature of design. Time and cost are always factors on even the most ambitious projects. Designers are also constrained in some way by their materials; physical materials have immutable properties, and even the digital medium introduces limitations due to its very lack of a physical nature. Other common constraints include regulatory requirements, competitive pressures, and the various desires of the people bankrolling the project. We as designer should be mindful that within these spaces of so-called constraint there is more than enough room to redefine the realities we knew a few moments ago.