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Forget the Pretty Pictures, Help People Do What They Want
Quote by Dirk Knemeyer
Great design should be appropriately beautiful. Yet, too often, designers let their fascination with beauty undermine great design.
Ultimately design is about creating something for use. Beauty is part of the equation but usability and usefulness are even more important.
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Design is Not a Theoretical Excercise
Quote by Andrei Herasimchuk
Too often, software designers get mired in unrealistic representations such as wireframes, paper prototypes, and even pixel-perfect screen prints.
Software is a kinetic, interactive media, and the only way to design for it properly is to go from theoretical design artifacts to real, working prototypes as quickly as possible.
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Reduce the Distance Between Users and Content
Quote by Luke Wroblewski
The primary expectation most users must have for their digital experiences is getting at the content.
That is why they've come, and it is why they stay. It is far too easy to put clutter like movies, ads, and candy between the users and the content they thirst for.
All of those things have a time and a place, but, when in doubt, always minimize the time to act—clicks, screens, windows, steps, and other interface mechanics—to reduce the distance between users and content.
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Real Data is Truth
Quote by Juhan Sonin
Shortcuts make design more efficient. Sometimes, they also make it worse.
Injecting Lorem Ipsum and other dummy data into design during the creation process sucks. Dummy data leads to dummy design.
As a designer, you must get your mitts on real data early in the creation cycle. Data will alter your design brain.
Great design surfaces Truth, and real data is Truth.
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Prototypes Aren't The End, They're the Means
Quote by Dirk Knemeyer
The first generation of digital designers got comfortable with their paper prototypes and static mock-ups. Code meant production; protoype meant we're almost done.
The reality is, prototypes are where it starts. You can't evaluate, much less test, software properly until it is behaving in the same environment and context as it will eventually live in.
Industrial designers get this. Graphic designers get this. So should you.
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Make Things
Quote by Luke Wroblewski
It really is just that simple: if you are a designer, you need to always be making things. As soon as the idea flits into your head, the pencil or marker or stylus should be in your hand.
Designers make. Makers ship. Shippers change the world. Always, always be making.
Buy more clay. Use more foam board. Break more LEGOs.
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Let the Ink, UI, and Lines Disappear
Quote by Juhan Sonin
Most of the time in interface design, less is more. Achieving it can be a very Zen-like process.
Clear your mind of your vision for the user interface. Close your eyes. Re-imagine solving the problems required by the interface as if you were contrained to having no UI at all.
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If Everything is Important, Nothing is Important
Quote by Andrei Herasimchuk
Trying to make every single thing attention-grabbing is a classic design mistake.
What you consider most important should—certainly, clearly, undeniably—be the single most important aspect of your design.
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Go as High Fidelity with Real Data as Fast as Possible
Quote by Luke Wroblewski
Telling a good story requires craft and attention.
Data is the story in applications, so making it as rich as possible as early as possible will radiate through the entire design, elevating your product.
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Gantt Charts are the Illusion of Management
Quote by Juhan Sonin
Project management is not about documents and process that appear orderly and require attention. Project management is about focusing on the product.
Communications, communications, and communcations make the best project management. A straightforward to-do list trumps fancy depedency graphs any day. Have the whole team focused on evolving prototype.
Talk about the prototype. Critique the prototype. Use the prototype. Have others bang on the prototype. Sleep with the prototype.
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Don't Design It If You Don't Know How It's Going to Be Built
Quote by Andrei Herasimchuk
For many designers, the details, nooks, and crannies of truly taking a design to "done" are the hardest part of the process.
Great design requires the focus, commitment, and attention to detail inherent in any craft. That means sticking with your design through every agonizing moment, ensuring the design integrity of your vision lives on in the product.
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You Should Be as Familiar with Code as Design
Quote by Dirk Knemeyer
Design skills and tools are important. After all, you can't design well without them.
However, you also can't design well without understanding how and what you make will be manifested. In interface design, that means code.
You may not like to code; you may not want to code. But if you don't invest the time to educate yourself in code to a similar degree as you were educated in design, you will not realize your potential.