- Great Design Vs Good Design: What’s The Difference? Here ‘s The way
- Jamal Nichols
- The Nuggets translation Project
- Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
- Translator: Mirosalva
- Reader: Qiu Hu, Charlo-o
The minimum standards for interface design have risen over the past decade, and you see much less of this now:
We’ve figured out how to make the user interface look good and perform pretty well. As in other mature industries, the industry standard you can get is already there: in a car, you don’t switch between gas and brake pedals, and you don’t put the seat outside the car. In the user interface, you don’t add blinking text or autoplay music, and you want things to be relatively clean.
This is a big step forward for industry, but what do we do now? Is it enough to stop making the most egregious mistakes? Or should we push for more?
I think the field of digital design is in dire need of us striving for greatness, not just settling for good.
But what does great design look like? How is it different from good design? Let’s look at some principles.
Good design gives people what they want. Great design solves people’s problems in unexpected ways
About a year ago, Samsung announced it was working on a foldable smartphone. One sentence caught my attention:
DJ Koh once said “it’s time to deliver a foldable device” after Samsung’s consumer research showed there was a market for such devices.
The fact that Samsung almost proudly cites customer research as the reason for its foldable smartphone is alarming.
It’s one thing to send your customers information about how satisfied they are with the product or how the latest product repair is going. But product development based on customer research is very questionable.
Customer research doesn’t lead to products like the iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch.
Here’s a classic example of overquoting Henry Ford: “If we asked people what they wanted, they would probably say ‘faster horses’.”
Great design comes from the understanding that the average layman can’t always articulate a solution, sometimes they just know they have a problem. It’s up to designers who live at the intersection of technology and creative art to come up with new ways to solve these problems, making unexpected connections between subjects and using new approaches to solve problems.
Good design is data-driven, and great design is data-driven
“Data-driven” is an interesting phrase. It literally means that data drives your decisions. The data point is in the driver’s seat, not you.
This situation is risky because not everything is an optimization problem that can be solved with data. Basing all your decisions on data points you can measure correctly can cause you to lose focus on the important macro-level problems you’re trying to solve.
Data is just one source of information to solve a problem. So if you want to produce great design, staying “data aware” can be the way to go.
Booking.com is a good example of data-driven design. They did A lot of A/B testing to understand how users could best convert to booking flights and hotels on their platform.
In tests, they found that adding “urgent messages” prompted users to order more. An urgent message is something like, “Hey, there are only four rooms left in this hotel, let’s book.” That’s fine, but booking.com has added message after message over the years, and it now feels more like a rambling overused car than a serious place to book a hotel.
Recently, it has started showing hotels you can’t even book, just to underscore the point: “Everyone books here at Booking.com, so come, too.”
I believe it can increase conversion rates by 0.4%. But if you look at the overall experience, it’s really starting to decline. Regardless of the overall experience, this is the type of result you get when you make short-term improvements to your product based on single-digit increases in data points and conversion rates.
Compare that to Hotel Tonight, a fast-growing Hotel booking app that was recently acquired by Airbnb for several million dollars.
Hotel Tonight understands that people want to find a nice room to stay in and optimize that. It shows a preview of a hotel room that is larger than booking.com and has a bit of an emergency message, but it doesn’t take up an entire page layout. They focus on the overall experience rather than just small conversions driven by data.
Good design tries to please everyone. Great design has its own ideas and challenges the consensus
Great design has a worldview and values that it consistently practices. It doesn’t try to please everyone.
Consider Apple’s MacBook and iPad versus Microsoft’s Surface. Microsoft’s approach is “We don’t want to decide what’s the best experience for consumers.” To some extent, they let consumers design their own experiences, rather than designing them.
What you get from that is a laptop with a touch screen and stylus that folds in both directions, and you can remove the screen as well. It looks good, but what do you really do with it?
At the same time, Apple’s approach “allows us to personalize the technology and create tools and shapes around specific usage scenarios.”
Iphones and ipads are designed to handle certain tasks previously assigned to laptops and desktops. In the process of creating these new looks, the iPhone and iPad can also handle overall new tasks. A similar process happens with the Apple Watch, which can handle tasks previously assigned to the iPhone as well as new ones.
In Apple’s view, the iPhone and iPad need to be separated from the Mac, because each category needs to be stronger than the original form factor. The idea is not to have these products share the same user input, so that users can do everything possible on their desktops and laptops and on their smartphones. Instead, each product has different features based on user input methods and form factors.
This is an opinionated approach to device design. Not everyone agrees with Apple’s approach, but the result is clear: Apple has outsold Microsoft’s products by 30 to 1 over the past four years.
Great design pays attention to details without losing sight of the big picture
Now you’ve seen a lot of companies talk about the importance of design. Salesforce released a comprehensive design system with a fancy name (the “Lightning Design System”) and a number of illustrated mascots.
However, they neglected to properly set the typography in this design system to optimize the readability of the screen. They had such a grand vision, but they ignored the fundamentals of design.
Another basic element that you often see overlooked is graphical contrast: the text on the surface of the image is unreadable… Despite all the talk about the importance of “good design”.
Focusing on the surface of the design and ignoring the basics is like focusing on a home run in baseball or a dunk in basketball. Fun to watch, but when tested in a realistic competitive environment, players who ignore the basics of the game will be crushed.
Great design never loses sight of the essential element of seeking to impress the world around it.
That means…
Good design tries to make a good impression. Great design is unforgettable
“A good designer will find an elegant way to put everything you need on one page. A great designer would have you believe that half the content is unnecessary.” — Thomas Hutchings (@dearimpossible) November 14, 2013
Good design aims to impress people with “pleasant animations” and “beautiful user interfaces”. You’ll find good designs, break them down and write down what you like and how you do it.
Great design is invisible, almost completely invisible to the sense that it was designed. Like your MacBook that automatically unlocks when you’re wearing an Apple Watch, or your Nest thermostat that automatically adjusts to a temperature of your choice when you enter a room. But it can also be as simple as a supermarket egg carton (have you tried designing a better egg carton?). .
Great design is invisible, almost completely invisible to the sense that it was designed. It comes from extreme care and the desire to help others.
Great design has vision, courage and self-discipline
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley right now to try to turn design into a process that can be copied and reproduced, no matter who you put in that position.
Creating a clearly defined process is a good idea, especially for large companies. But when you’re working at this level day in and day out in an organization, it’s easy to get overly focused on optimizing the process and lose perspective on what you’re building and why. You end up iterating and optimizing on things that don’t matter. It can happen to all of us sometimes.
Part of doing great design is creating a compelling vision of the future, and having the courage and discipline to stick to that vision in the face of adversity.
Just following the process step-by-step does not produce great design. That way you can get a “good enough” design. But the difference between good design and great design is the difference between good success and great success.
In my opinion, the essence of creating great design is this:
The way to create an effective narrative of the experience’s vision is to start with the current experience. What is it about today’s product or service experience that frustrates our users? We can ask: what is the best experience we can imagine for our users? We closely track frustration points and imagine experiences in which those frustration points would not occur. The next step is to determine the time horizon for the baseline. […]. Most of our vision experiences are closer to the 5-year baseline. […]. What is the best experience we can imagine in five years (or whatever baseline we choose)? How much better are people’s lives because we get rid of all the frustrations?
A compelling vision is what will position the “process machine” in the organization to create great products.
It’s fairly easy for a seasoned designer to define an experience vision in that way. The constant self-discipline required to pursue this vision makes it almost impossible to achieve. That’s why there are so many weird products out there, and why most apps and websites look the same. Just being “good enough” is easier to do.
Embrace great design
There are many reasons to try to do great work rather than just “good enough” work: it sets you apart. It makes people around you happier, it makes you happier, it’s fun and satisfying.
But most importantly, is there anything else you want to do with your life? What better thing to spend your time on than doing your best to make the world around you better? If everyone did this think about what kind of world we’d be living in, starting with you.
Share your story
Can you give some examples of great design? Share with us in the comments below.
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