Everyday Design Thinking: Do’s and D…iscuss with the team
What makes good design, after all?
[Exercise 3] 🪒
One of the pillars of user experience is how design affects the product the user interacts with. In this post I would like to discuss three examples of products I have interacted with recently and consider to have quality design, as well as three other products with which my experience hasn’t been too great. These will be heavily informed by the design principles as stated by Dieter Rams.
#1 A table lamp.
There’s no denying: the design of this lamp is pretty innovative — I bet you didn’t picture this type of lamp in your mind’s eye when you read the title. This lamp is also particularly useful because the light comes down radially, so that whichever angle you’re getting the light from, the amount of light will be the same — great for public studying spaces. It is also a sober product: monochromatic, made of simplified shapes, doesn’t have too many details, buttons nor chords attached — in fact, it’s stripped down to one switch, which you can’t miss even at the most careless of glances; and that on its turn means this lamp is easily understandable, another important design principle for Dieter Rams. The lamp is unobtrusive in that it doesn’t take up a lot of space, having such stripped down visuals. It definitely seems sturdy enough that it is long lasting, and can be seen as an example of thorough design because it doesn’t have any more features/designing (as Dieter Rams puts it) than it needs. It’s a much welcome simple execution of the basic idea of portable lighting for surfaces.
#2 A studying chair with surprising wheels.
Oh, do allow me to tell you a secret: the only reason why I have this picture of this chair is because I immediately fell in love with it when I first saw it, and consequently had to tell all my friends about this crazy comfortable chair I found at my new local studying space (full disclosure, I’ve been living in São Paulo for 1 year and 2 days as of the moment I type out this line). Dieter Rams’ principles of good design helped me articulate all the things that I love about this chair: it is innovative by the mere fact that we as a society seem to divide chairs into two groups: swivel chairs and regular chairs. No cross-over, no in-betweens. Well, here’s evidence we might have been doing it wrong all along. It is also a good example of ergonomics: there’s the very comfortably foamy upholstery; the height of the backrest is tall enough I would say, which is ideal for thoracic support; it has a curve reminiscent of the the spine’s natural curve; and the arm rests don’t have arm supports, which allows the legs more room for moving and searching for the perfect comfy sit-still position. Also, no one would dare to speak ill of the visuals of this chair: minimalist, all-black, lean, modern. So many adjectives. I would finally argue that this is another good example of a product stripped down to the traditional function of a chair, nothing more and nothing less.
#3 Instagram. Yes.
I’ll admit it before you can lay your charges: I’m a fan of Instagram, and have been for many years. It has become progressively more difficult to defend my stance and stand by the decisions they’ve been making, but I still enjoy many aspects of the platform. The first thing that I love about Instagram is that the app has absolute no margins — a pretty bold decision for an app that is intensely used as social media. That’s an extremely frugal measure that avoids compromising image quality and places the focus of the whole social media on photography: a picture on standard portrait format takes more than half of the screen on the main feed. Also, the dock has only 5 icons fairly spaced out, and the settings menu is tucked away on the profile page, as if to say unabashedly: listen, the centre of attention for this social media really is the feed. Go appreciate people’s photos, illustrations and last weekend’s garden barbecue memorabilia. Instagram also uses a minimal black-and-white colour scheme which doesn’t clash with the content being uploaded to the platform. It really embodies the concepts of unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough to the last detail, and minimal design.
Now to a less exciting part…
I’m not one for detracting, but it’s important to learn lessons from some of the things that we think don’t work too well on the products we interact with on a daily basis.
I would like to briefly comment on how Slack’s lack of a homepage drives me mad. I just absolutely adore the feeling of “finishing using an app” by going back to the original home screen before I hop off. Where’s Slack’s home-screen, though? How can I access different workspaces — do I always have to tap that grid icon? And why doesn’t swiping right prompt the side-menu, which always leads me to pressing “back” in an attempt to trigger it, only for Slack to shut down and make me reopen the app, and then it has to load everything back again. That is obtrusive as hell, and anti-intuitive if compared to how apps are built these days. It could also make use of layering for displaying and organising a workspace’s different channels, or just deploy a good ol’ folder hierarchy such as Windows does — it’s been around for over 30 years at this point.
Also, another product that bugs me on the daily is pop-sockets. While I’m a firm defender of them — specially for bigger-sized mobiles, such as the one I call my own — , they are the antithesis of long lasting. The average time a pop-socket lasts for me is 2 months. I could do with a bit more-definitive-less-disposable and therefore environmentally friendly alternative.
And finally, another mini-hell I go through more frequently than I’d like to admit is the app for making calls developed by Sony. This app puts in a blender the dialling screen and the contact info screen, therefore being responsible for the surefire wrong call I give every two days, as well as giving me a hard time editing a contact’s info and sending me into an awkward flush of apologies via text because I randomly just called a person with whom I only exchange messages. Yes, that level of cringe. Every time I misspell somebody’s last name.
What is good design then?
You thought I would just drop this line in the subheading and leave it there, right? But we did discuss at Ironhack some interesting adaptations people have made (and continuously make, as explained by Chirryl-Lee Ryan in this enlightening article) to what is considered to be good design. Dieter Rams’ compilation was seminal, but it doesn’t exhausts the topic, nor is it set in stone. It’s a famous and influential frame of reference, but it doesn’t substitute hands-on practice and experience. The best advice I’ve heard during this exploration of good/awful design is that good design is always dependent on what your team has set as best practices. Listening to each other is a valuable tool to add to the box, it seems.
