I have finally finished my book, Designing by Drawing: A practical guide to creating usable interactive design, and it's now available for purchase as a full-color paperback, or a pdf. Or buy both if you want. If you are one of those who is still regularly visiting the template post, or asks design process questions, this is something you want to read.
In addition to the direct, fairly step-by-step and (I hope practical) guide to design, the beginning is a fair bit of theory, and more general guidelines. I hope they are also useful and directly applicable as well. Both to market the book, and because I do find it interesting enough I'd blog about it if I hadn't written a book instead, I'm going to periodically excerpt bits of it and talk about them additionally here.
First up, Good Design or Functional Design (78.4 kb pdf):
Most interactive projects I have worked on for the past fifteen years have been guided by... well, nothing. Vague ideas, some requirements maybe, or printouts of what the competition is doing.
The next better step, solid business requirements, has generally been adopted as the best possible guidance for your project. Far too much of the time they are all but functional requirements, so leave no room to design a solution, and never really give a sense of the concept.
As a result, I've tended to make up my own design objectives (these are discussed section 1.4.9 of the book, which maybe I'll excerpt some other time). Here’s a real example of a design objective I made while at Sprint:
Manual registration is a requirement for improved security, as well as within our current technical environment, but is a known barrier to entry for customers. To assure as many customers aspossible complete registration or conversion, the process must be as seamless as possible:
- As few fields as possible should be presented
- Whenever information is systematically available, it should be pre-populated
- Information should be grouped by task
- Labels and descriptions should be clear, truthful and use standard terminology
These provide a great checkpoint to assure you and the client (and the developers) agree, and terrific guidance as the project proceeds. I try to stick this at the front of each deliverable, though often people get tired of looking at it, so I am still working on that.
But there's also a way to more absolutely guide yourself, and gauge if a launched design is (at it's most basic level) good from a functional, effective, end-product point of view.
I think that Kauffman’s twelve precepts of Good Design (1950, MoMA) are informative to review for designers even today:
- Fulfill the practical needs of modern life
- Express the spirit of our times
- Benefit by contemporary advances in the fine arts and pure sciences
- Take advantage of new materials and techniques and develop familiar ones
- Develop the forms, textures and colours that spring from the direct fulfilment of requirements in appropriate materials and techniques
- Express the purpose of an object, never making it seem to be what it is not
- Express the qualities and beauties of the materials used, never making the materials seem to be what they are not
- Express the methods used to make an object, not disguising mass production as handicraft or simulating a technique not used
- Blend the expression of utility, materials and process into a visually satisfactory whole
- It should be simple – its structure evident in its appearance, avoiding extraneous enrichment
- Master the machine for the service of people
- Serve as wide a public as possible, considering modest needs and limited costs no less challenging than the requirements of pomp and luxury
A lot of these still make a lot of sense, – furniture designers working today put these to good use in their day-to-day work – but they also imply a specific style of design. Of course, this was intentional at the time, and guides a specific style of design in furniture, interior design and decoration.
For interaction design, I am personally unconcerned with additional adornment, or the style of the design, as long as it does not interfere with the primary functionality. There’s room to argue what involves adornment that interferes, hence the original Good Design movement, and many others.
But much of the concepts, of both design and that designed products are mass-distributed (by factories originally, now by that as well as time-sharing on computer networks) I might modify these precepts, therefore, as follows for contemporary interactive design purposes:
- Fulfill the practical needs of your users
- Express the spirit of our times
- Benefit by contemporary advances in technology and the understandings of human behaviors
- Take advantage of new technologies and techniques and develop new ones
- Allow the form, and position of each element to spring naturally from the direct fulfillment of requirements, using appropriate techniques and methods
- Express the purpose of an element, never making it seem to be what it is not
- Express the qualities and truth of the information presented, never making information seem to be what it is not
- Emphasize transparency in process, intent and information processing, to gain the faith and trust of your users
- Blend the expression of utility, technology and process into a visually satisfactory whole
- It should be simple – its meaning and content evident by its appearance, avoiding extraneous enrichment
- The system should work for the end user, instead of for its own means
- Serve as wide a public as possible, considering modest or specialized needs, and limited capabilities as no less challenging than the requirements of your most expected or profitable users
These are still pretty esoteric-sounding, so what does that mean? Well, basically, that functionality should never be degraded, obscured or damaged by the design of the information. But tell me what you think. Propose your own modified version of these, or tell me why they are good or bad or just navel-gazing pointlessness.
Myself, I’ll have a lot more to say about information, presentation and design specifics (as well as the creation of design objectives) later.
We always invite discussion of our posts, and the book is no different. Comments posted on this page will be included in the book next time I publish a variant of it. Every month or two, if I get enough traffic or change my process and want to add to the book. The blue text to the right of the main copy as shown below are comments from readers.
