Design is.

“Good design” is difficult to define. Many factors can determine what makes a design good and, inevitably, good design is subjective. However, from reading about design, learning about design, and designing myself, I established a couple of points on how I understand good design.

Design should (not) be intuitive.

From the perspective of a user, good design is intuitive. Good design should be clear, both in what a user can and cannot do. However, intuition is not static. Familiarity with many common actions and allowances continues to grow and change over years of using certain products. Thus, intuitiveness should not keep designers from also being innovative and creative.

That all being said, from the perspective of a designer, intuition may not be so advantageous. User testing, I realized from my own experience, is so important because often times users would need to clarify certain aspects of the design that I hadn’t considered to be confusing. Designers must be careful that, when creating an interface, they do not apply and implement features that make sense to themselves but lose the user as they interact with the design.

Design should be comfortable.

This point ties in with the previous point on intuition but, here, comfortable covers a broader scope: easy to navigate, void of unnecessary distractions, pleasing to the senses and the mind, etc. Sometimes the smallest inconveniences can make a huge difference as to whether a user enjoyably interacts with a design.

Admittedly, I find this more difficult to consider than expected as everyone’s level and standards of comfort varies. For example, in Murnane et al.’s paper on their design process of the fitness app WhoIsZuki, they mentioned that some users enjoyed the notifications for reminders and updates from the app while others found the notifications intrusive and distracting. A feature like this might be balanced by allowing settings and preferences, but a designer must also be careful that these preferences do not defeating the purpose of the design altogether (helping the user to exercise regularly).

Design should be functional and helpful.

Every design has a function, a purpose to achieve, and at the end of the day, the most important question when it comes to design really is…does it work? Does the design do its job? And, on top of being functional, does this design actually help? Does this design produce more benefits as opposed to detriments?

Good design does not always have to provide some grand or revolutionary usage. In fact, from my experiencing designing for projects in my HCI class, I found that designing for a more focused group of goals and users is so much easier. As users, people search for and gravitate toward products that they believe will in some way positively impact their lives and, well, a design cannot positively impact users if it does not work to begin with.

At the end of the day…

Design cannot be perfect. In fact, I actually think that a world with perfect design, whatever that would be, would be pretty boring. The world of new and innovative design is exciting, and with perfect design, that world would not exist.