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A well-designed object is one we don’t have to think about. It makes the right choice the easiest one.
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It’s the totality of all the choices people have made, perhaps accumulated over years or generations, that explains everything we experience, and defines who benefits and who does not.
Except for nature’s gifts, we have rarely obtained good design for free.
Regarding ease of use, and most kinds of quality, often building things is easier than designing things.
But to build, as I’m using the word, means the goal is to finish building. To design, or to design well, means the goal is to improve something for someone. This means that just because you built the thing the right way doesn’t mean you built the right thing.
This is what psychologist Noel Burch called unconscious incompetence, where a person is unaware that they are bad at something
As book designer Douglas Martin explains, “The question about whether design is necessary or affordable is beside the point. Design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.”
This means we can’t really say that something is well designed unless we identify what it’s going to be used for.
Good designers ask two questions throughout any project to make sure the context is well understood: What are you trying to improve? Who are you trying to improve it for?
This all means we should resist judging how good or bad an idea is until we clarify the problem to solve and who we are solving it for.
We often fall into the trap of calling something intuitive if it makes sense to us, and call it hard to use if it doesn’t. This assumes that everyone has the same knowledge and culture (ours!).
By starting with one real person, and one real problem, you’re guaranteed to satisfy a real need, without getting lost in the challenges of building or hubris. And if you can’t solve one real problem for one real person, it’s a good indicator that you probably can’t solve a problem for millions of people, either.
An honest designer knows they have to invest in time listening to customers, quietly observing them as they do their work, or testing early design prototypes, to understand what the real needs are.
A classic lesson in using mental models to improve a design is the possibly apocryphal story of how one of Houston’s airports designed its baggage system. After complaints about long waits, they hired more baggage handlers, which helped, but complaints still came in. They decided to do something unusual. They routed bags to the farthest carousel from the arrival gates, which made the walk six times longer. This sounds at first like a mistake, but it meant that when passengers arrived at baggage claim, their bags would already be there. Complaints dropped to zero.
The success of people with ideas has always depended not on their creative talents alone but on their ability to persuade.
Engineers often use the 5 Whys (developed by Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries), asking the question “why” several times to get past symptoms and understand the cause, for similar reasons.
Architecture: Define, Collect, Brainstorm, Develop, Feedback, Improve Military OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act Medicine: Examine, Communicate, Treat UX Design: Empathize, Define, Create, Prototype, Test Total Quality Management: Scan, Focus, Act, Feedback
Senior product designer Diógenes Brito explains that “[good] designers are facilitators, they assist others in refining and transmitting ideas.”
As W. Edwards Deming wrote, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
A quote often attributed to organizational design expert Arthur Jones says that any system or organization is “perfectly designed to get the results that it gets.”
William Gibson once said something like: “If you want to understand a new technology, ask yourself how it would be used in the hands of the criminal, the policeman, and the politician.”
The IEC 60601-1-8, a standard for sounds that get used in any item of medical equipment, mandates the use of just six sounds—sounds that were never tested and in some cases combine to create what’s called the devil’s interval (F-sharp and C), which is so unpleasant it was banned in churches during the medieval era, when it was believed that devil lived in this combination of tones.
