Design for Humans
Or 14 Principles of Good Design
14Principles of Good Design have been taken from the book Hackers and Painters. The essay inspired me to explore about Design and look around to understand how things work. This article is a result of the examples I gathered over the last one year, supporting the 14 principles.
Note on how to read this article: Skim through the page speedily. Repeat the process again, only slower this time! If the images are still loading, do not worry. They will be here any moment.
14. Good Design is simple.
A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
13. Good Design is timeless.
If you can make something that appeals to people today and would have also appealed to people in 1500, then there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500
After receiving feedback on the article, I felt I need to talk about how we have brought timelessness to Application design. I am sure you must have observed icons such as share, delete or save buttons remain consistent over different applications be it on mobile/web. They will continue to remain more or less invariable in the distant future too.
The reason being as an Application developer, one wouldn’t want the users to have a steep learning curve to be able to use the application. At my previous startup where I was working, we did not shy away from designing our application taking the good parts from Facebook design to help users understand the platform.
12. Good Design solves the right problem.
Paul Graham, author of the essay has a very interesting take on this idea with a beautiful example, which is:
“A typical stove has four burners arranged in a square and a dial to control each. How do you arrange the dials ? The simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a simple answer for the wrong question. The dials are for humans to use and if you put them in a row, the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials in square like the burners or otherwise arrange the burners in a row to match the dials.”
11. Good Design is suggestive.
A good code should be read like a story, not like a puzzle
“In math and science, it means a proof or theory that becomes the basis for a lot of new work and also leads to future discoveries.”
10. Good Design is often slightly funny.
A good code is like a good joke. Writing comments is like explaining the joke.
Aren’t you amused when you land on some web pages which do not actually exist ?
9. Good Design is hard.
Let me tell you a story about Picasso to help you understand the above idea.
One fine morning Picasso is sitting in the park, sketching.
A woman walks by, recognizes him, runs up to him and pleads with him to draw her portrait. He’s in a good mood, so he agrees and starts sketching.
A few minutes later, he hands her the portrait. The lady is ecstatic, she gushes about how wonderfully it captures the very essence of her character, what beautiful, beautiful work it is, and asks how much she owes him.
“$5,000, madam”, says Picasso.
The lady is taken aback, outraged, and asks how that’s even possible given it only took him 5 minutes.
Picasso looks up and, without missing a beat, says:
“No, madam, it took me my whole life!”
Good design is indeed hard and takes rigorous practice and time.
8. Good Design looks easy.
To make a beautiful portrait, all you have to do is get 8 or 10 lines at the right place. The tricky part is to get them in “exactly” the right place.
Appearance of ease seems to come with PRACTICE. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought.
In the programming world we say, using a UI component doesn’t tell you much about how to build one, in the same way that eating a cake does not teach you how to bake a cake.
7. Good Design uses symmetry.
A symmetric design helps achieve simplicity.
In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way. The Eiffel Tower looks striking partly because it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower.
6. Good Design resembles nature.
Imitating nature also works in engineering. Boats have long had spines and ribs like an animal’s rib cage.
5. Good Design is redesign.
The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the 8th re-write.
We admire Apple for it’s aesthetics and the human touch they bring into their products.
In software, we do not arrive at an optimum solution on the first attempt. The first battle would be to arrive at a solution by brute force method. Then, we identify the areas where the complexity is large and beat around the code to bring it down. After a number of iterations, we arrive at an efficient algorithm satisfying the desired benchmarks.
4. Good Design can copy.
The greatest masters go on to achieve a kind of selflessness. They just want to get the right answer and if part of the right answer has already been discovered by someone else, that’s no reason not to use it. They’re confident enough to take from anyone without feeling that their own vision will be lost in the process.
One of the first things we do when we begin to learn a new skill is we’d look at others. How do others do it ? This is true for whether you are learning to blow a whistle or you want to become a great singer. A young kid mimics songs sung by her favorite singer.
This is true for most of the art forms. I have learnt a great deal about programming by watching others write code, be it through online courses, live sessions or meetups. I am always curious about the software tools the speaker is using like presentation tool, OS, editor and shortcut keys.
Watching others how they do a specific task has been an inherent part of my learning. This is also known as vicarious learning. Albert Bandura, an American psychologist, coined the social learning theory which proposes that new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others.
3. Good Design is strange.
What would happen if all the five fingers of our hand were of equal length ?
If we would have fingers of equal length, then it would have been quite a tedious task to grab a fruit in the palm, almost near impossible. Tasks like gripping a pen and holding a spoon are possible due to difference in the length of the fingers.
Nature is strangely odd indeed.
However, this idea of strangeness cannot be cultivated. If you just try to make good things, you will inevitably do it in a distinctive way.
Einstein did not try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and truth turned out to be strange.
2. Good Design happens in chunks.
On February, 15 2017, ISRO created a world record by successfully putting 104 satellites into the orbit in a single mission. The Isro’s PSLV-C37 included the Cartosat-2 series and 103 co-passenger satellites from countries such as Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, the UAE and US.
Here’s to the crazy ones…
1. Good Design is often daring.
You are now reading an article by Abid Uzair titled as “Design for Humans: Or 14 Principles of Good Design” published on Medium. You have scrolled through most of the article and the last principle of the 14 principles has caught your attention. You are wondering if what you are reading actually makes any sense to the subject of the heading.
You will understand my parody provided you have read the book “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” written by Italo Calvino. To put it simply, it is a book about YOU the reader who’s trying to read a book “If on Winter’s Night a Traveler.” You will be challenged as a reader!
Closing Remarks:
Thoughts on Hackers & Painters:
Paul Graham’s book, Hackers & Painters has had a profound effect on me in the way I look at programming and art in general. It made me see programming as a form of art and developers as creative people and makers. I saw myself as a person who liked building stuff to solve his own problems. I naturally got inclined towards writers, painters, comedians, musicians, designers and people from other artistic forms.
user=> (= "programming" "art")
;; trueIf you are wondering which programming language it is, well it’s a LISP language called Clojure.
Further exploration:
I have jotted down few resources that might be interesting. Hope you have lot of fun learning about it.
- 📗 Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham
- 🎤Twelve ways to make code suck less by Venkat Subhramaniam
- 🎥 Journey of a Joke feat. Kunal Kamra by Abhish Mathew
- 📘 Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson
- 📄 The Original Macintosh by Andy Hertzfeld
Credits:
This article is incomplete without appreciating the efforts of people who have helped me bring this work to you. A quick shout to all the photographers, designers, authors, public speakers and content creators in general. I owe you a lot!💕
Claps 👏 are much appreciated. You can clap up to 50 to support my work!😅
Thanks for reading!🙌
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