Design’s primary function is to satisfy human needs — physical, psychological, or both. The design process can help improve a product’s usability — such as making a hammer more comfortable to hold or a website easier to navigate. Or it can improve the ability of organizations, such as Airbnb and Amazon, to deliver great services. Design also can make us happy by telling a great story — a great product pulls the right heartstrings, and a friendly user interface, for example, reinforces that story.
Why do some products and services exceed expectations, while others fail to impress? Good design practice is all about balancing research and curiosity, heart and hand.
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Empathy
The ability to understand and share the feelings of the people you are designing for is essential to creating a great product or service. Get to know the people you are designing for. Interview them, observe them, and co-create with them. Show them a prototype early, and let them tell YOU what works best, what confuses them, or what they really need from your product. After your product launches, don’t be afraid to iterate and improve the design and usability to better serve users and their needs.
Craft
Attention to the details plus a solid knowledge of design tools and materials help designers create flawless presentations that please the eye and inspire. Here is where typography meets photography, and where color and composition create hierarchy and mood. With visual design, pay attention to the quality of assets, size of your type, alignment of elements on the screen, and color consistency. For any product, digital or analog, limit your design to the essentials and focus on making those components great.
Place
Context is everything. Designers who understand where their design will be seen can introduce features that are exponentially more useful. Don’t limit what users can do with your product depending on where they are or what device they are using. Instead, enhance what they can do using GPS, camera, audio, or voice. Try designing content for reading while walking — quick alerts or bite-sized information.
Story
Design that is emotional, that transforms us, that takes us on a journey we can identify with will also persuade us. Give your audience a narrative to sink their teeth into. In addition to words and images, use motion. The speed at which a website’s off-canvas menu eases in and out can say a lot about your brand: Does it bounce, slide, or fade? Make sure your product’s user interface complements the story you want to tell. Motion adds moments of delight that don’t go unnoticed.
Time
How long will your product be used? Should it be built to last, or is it temporary? Should it be flexible enough to change over the course of a year or a few minutes? Ask these questions when designing an object, publication, website feature, or even an organization. Try balancing immediate needs with long-term success. Design priorities can change when we look at time from various perspectives.
Spirit
As a designer, spirit is the most non-tangible design principle, but perhaps the most important. It’s about having passion for your projects and a resourcefulness to learn anything in order to get the job done well. Work with designers that start from the heart and push to be better. Tina Roth Eisenberg, founder of Creative Mornings, a lecture series for the creative community, embodies spirit. “Unstoppable enthusiasm when needed” is how she describes her super power.
Whether you are a designer or working with designers, these six principles of good design will help guide your process. Check back to them at different stages of your project. In future posts, I’ll explore each principle in detail and provide some great examples.
Ben Bilow Creative Director Creative success comes from digging in, getting messy, and making stuff. As a kid in St. Louis, my interest in skateboarding and rock & roll music shaped my work ethic — be resourceful, build community, share. We invented our own fun, designing rock posters and building half-pipes — tearing them down and doing it again.