Principles of Good Design for Interaction Designers

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6. Good design is honest

At first it might seem odd to describe design in terms of honesty, but imagine this scenario as a way to understand how truth applies to design: you walk into a used car showroom, and it’s filled with flashing lights, highly colored banners, balloons floating everywhere, loud music and an overall sense of carnival. The cars on display are gleaming with polish and covered with signs that say “AMAZING DEAL – NOW $1000.00 OFF!” The salesperson approaches you and immediately launches into a scripted pitch designed to take your focus off the fact that the cars on sale are all over ten years old and they all have over 100,000 miles on the odometer. The dealership is hoping you’ll be so focused on the experience and distractions that you won’t notice the mediocre quality of the actual merchandise.

Dishonest design is doing the same thing the tricky dealership in the above example is doing: it conveys a message that doesn’t match the underlying experience. Phrases like “lipstick on the pig” are used in design when we talk about taking one kind of experience and trying to make it seem like more than it is, or something else entirely, by wrapping it in a design that conveys a different kind of feeling.

Honest design elevates the forms it supports by working in harmony with function and purpose. Dishonest design tricks the user into feeling something not supported by the underlying form, and by working to obscure function. Everyone has seen Adobe’s Flash abused on web sites in the same way our used car example above used balloons, colors, music and lights.

To reference my standby analogy, floating green balls are dishonest.

7. Good design is long-lasting

This principle is something that organically grows from principles already discussed – if your design is aesthetically in harmony with the underlying form and function of the thing you’re building, if the design is unobtrusive and elegant and if the design is honest, then the chances are very good that your design will stand the test of time, even as particular trends come and go.

Most designers are aware of many movements that have proven themselves as creative wellsprings over time: Art Deco, Bauhaus, Functionalism and the like, and we often strive to discover that sense of longevity in our own designs. Great design strives to avoid caving into fads and passing trends – think neon color schemes from the 80s or avocado and goldenrod appliances from the 70s – as these designs tend to copy a single interesting source and spread like wildfire, only to disappear as attention moves on to the next big thing.

Fad designs tend to ignore principles of aesthetics and honesty when it comes to matching form and function, but are rather applied with the logic “everyone is doing glass-effects on buttons these days!” or “Goldenrod is so hot right now!”

8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail

Great designers often have reputations for being obsessive-compulsive when it comes to details – a badge most of us consider a requirement for the work we do. There’s a cheesy and hackneyed saying that happens to be completely true when it comes to design: “magic happens when inspiration meets perspiration” (paraphrased). Many people have the seeds of great design ideas, but it’s the thorough and flawless execution of those ideas, and the total attention to realizing every detail, that makes the magic.

Apple is a classic example of comprehensive modern design – when people experienced the first iPhone there were countless comments about how the device felt like a transformational moment in design due to an exceptional marriage between the rounded form of the hardware, the rounded tiles of the home screen and the exceptionally intuitive implementation of touch. Everything about the iPhone felt connected from the moment you held the device in your palm through the swiping and tapping metaphors through the fluid motion of screen transitions – every detail of the experience was considered, tuned and tweaked to reinforce the vision of form and function.

We’ve all seen designs that have brilliant ambitions but fail to succeed due to incomplete or haphazard implementations. Many of the first generation Android tablets and the first Windows Phone 7s, for example, are clear examples of solid designs that fail due to a lack of polish; it only takes one mis-step -- like an unresponsive touch screen, a choppy screen transition or a frustrating user flow – to tarnish the entire design of an otherwise solid offering.

9. Good design is environmentally friendly

Although this principle applies less to digital design and more to material goods, the lesson here is that Designers often directly impact the lives of thousands or even millions of people, and we need to understand what that kind of scale means – scale brings responsibility. Imagine you’re designing a coffee pot, and you’ve fallen in love with a new plastic that perfectly matches the form and function of your device… however, you become aware that the plastic creates harmful byproducts when it’s manufactured and is particularly nasty in landfills. What happens when there are tens of thousands of this coffee pot in the market? Designers must take responsibility for their creations, especially when we work at scale.

In the world of digital design I tend to change this principle to read “Good design is socially responsible”. Whenever you make something for other people to use, I believe there’s a responsibility to do no harm -- design doesn’t just elevate through aesthetics and elegance, it elevates through function. If the underlying function of a design is exploitative or harmful, there’s no way the design can be good.

10. Good design is as little design as possible

After everything else, this is sometimes the hardest principle for designers to embrace. Great ideas tend to start out as very simple inspirations, but the act of creation almost always tends to balloon that initial, simple spark into a giant behemoth as new ideas flood-in while projects progress. For any given project there are countless possible additions, many of which are equally valid, equally useful and equally inspired – but understanding when you’ve hit the golden line of just enough but not too much can be extremely hard for even the most restrained Designer.

Understanding when it’s appropriate to expand ideas and when it’s necessary to edit and contract is one of the most valuable skills in a Designer's toolbox.

When we’re in the thick of initial creative ideation we don’t want to restrict the free flow of ideas too strongly or we risk cutting off potentially important creative pathways before they’ve been adequately explored. We take the initial simple spark of creation and start making the form, and we add to it and play with it and go on a journey with it… and along that journey it grows through accretion. Understanding when it’s time to stop ideation and start editing is an art unto itself – the very best designers have developed a sense for when enough is enough or too much and when it’s time to start carving the thing down to the best and purest expression of whatever its form and function entails.

Closing thoughts

As with any set of best practices, there will be times when it's not possible to reach every ideal -- a classic example is the short-term advertising campaign that capitalizes on a white-hot trend to meet immediate needs. Even in less than ideal situations, however (and let's face it: most real-world situations have pressures that force us to fall short of our ultimate aspirations), Designs benefit from Designers pushing for excellence in the above 10 critical areas. It doesn't matter if you're at the heart of a sea change in Design with sweeping ramifications or if you're working on a short-term advertising project -- pushing for Design excellence not only results in a superior product, but it lifts us all.

Design is everywhere we look and it's a huge part of our lives -- we have a responsibility to keep a high bar on everything we do.

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