Software can be designed to simplify tasks and to create a positive overall experience for users. Thoroughly understanding the goals of users and stakeholders and designing software with those goals in mind are the best approaches to successfully delivering products that will delight customers. Read more – ‘IBM’s Design Principles’.
Design elements, laws and principles, garnered over centuries of observation, describe fundamental ideas about the practice of good visual design that are assumed to be the basis of all intentional visual design strategies. The elements form the 'vocabulary' of the design, while the laws and principles constitute the broader structural aspects of its composition. David Hume described these as "the constant and universal principles of human nature." Awareness of the elements, laws and principles in design is the first step in creating successful visual compositions. While these universal design elements, laws and principles may not always be absolutes, understanding them can help you achieve success in a multitude of fields including graphic, industrial design and experience design, architecture and fine art. Read more – ‘11 Laws and Principles to Use in Design’.
Inclusive design is well established in architecture and industrial design and the principles that apply to these disciplines are equally relevant on the web. It’s people that your website engages with, not technologies, so a user-centered approach is fundamental. Read more – ‘The Ten Principles of Inclusive Web Design’.
Mobile design is an entirely new breed of design says Brian Fling; you need to think of your app as a great book; it has a clear beginning, middle and end. Read more – ‘6 Rules for Designing Amazing Apps’.
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things. Read more – ‘Steve Jobs: Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff’.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. Read more – ‘The Cathedral and the Bizarre’.
The myth of creative genius is resilient: We believe that great ideas pop fully formed out of brilliant minds, in feats of imagination well beyond the abilities of mere mortals. But Design Thinking is neither a sudden breakthrough nor the lightning strike of genius; it is the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process, followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement. Read more – ‘How to Make Design Thinking Part of the Innovation Drill’.
Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t need weird shoes or a black turtleneck to be a design thinker. Nor are design thinkers necessarily created only by design schools, even though most professionals have had some kind of design training. Many people outside professional design have a natural aptitude for design thinking, which the right development and experiences can unlock. Read more – ‘A Design Thinker’s Personality Profile’.
The visual principles of harmony, unity, contrast, emphasis, variety, balance, proportion, pattern and direction (and others) are widely recognised and practiced, even when they aren’t formally articulated. But creating a good design doesn’t automatically mean creating a good experience. In order for us to cultivate positive experiences for our users, we need to establish a set of guiding principles for experience design. Read more – ‘Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX’.
Good designs are useful, usable and desirable. But what is a good experience? While crafting the experience of her own startup, Foodspotting, Alexa Andrzejewski found answers in urban design. Asking the same question about urban experiences, Kevin Lynch, author of Good City Form, extracted a set of dimensions for evaluating experiences. By applying these principles to interactive experiences, you can identify what kind of experience you’re creating for users: Is it adaptable? Does it tell a story? Are there signs of life? You’ll leave with a set of guidelines that, unlike traditional heuristics, will enable you to evaluate the experiential qualities of your designs. Read more – ‘The Dimensions of a Good Experience’.
