The Nature of Design

A Self Reflection on Failure

When I first began my journey as a designer, I incorrectly assumed in my time that Design was cold and logical. I was mistaken design instead comes from deep emotion and rationality. A fully realized self as defined Immanuel Kant is those who use logic and emotion to be. Not the cold logic of an unrealized self.

Design too has this rationality, a starting designer will fall into the obvious pitfalls of not understanding one's audience, to the intricate design, and understanding of the human mind. I am writing this article in low of my own failings often I would find myself behind my peers due to my objective failings and shortcomings not realizing until recently of the fully realized designer is that that considers human emotion and experiences.

If you want to design experiences, you have to live them either vicariously or on your own. Authors are often attributed with the “write what you know,” designers it is the same, “Design what you know and for impact.” Design is a delicate balance of skill, artistic ability, understanding, and deep seated rationality. If you are a designer you create something for someone to use, you design every button, pick every color with deeper meaning. Sometimes the user will never realize what you designed and there will be shortcomings in your design, no matter how perfect you might think it might be.

Failure is apart of design, if people were perfect every interface no matter how terrible would work. In these instances of people misunderstanding objects within interfaces, is not because of the user’s misunderstanding but the designers failure to understand their audience. This can be clearly seen with the redesign to Google’s Interfaces, Microsoft’s Panel System, and Reddit’s Redesign (2018). All of these failed to incorporate user understanding and suitable redesign. Sometimes taking the design too far from the original design, simplifying too much, or over complicating the interface.

Design is about simplicity, creating a space that someone can ask a simple question such as “How do I find the contact information?” and be able to find that information through steps of information. Not hundreds of windows searching for 1 information packet. This can be seen no more clearly than in the game : Diablo 2. Diablo 2 is often hailed as a fine and brilliant game in terms of design and development. Yet its interfaces even for their time were lack luster, and nestled mess. Either for time development some UI elements were entirely rushed such as the skill selection of active abilities or hidden behind keyboard inputs not made painfully aware to the player.

The point of a good interface is to have everything centralized, giving your player all the information they could want as quickly as possible. Not hidden behind button presses or command keys. You want your players to have a full understanding of the system they are using. Hiding them does the interface no good.

But this isn’t true for all circumstances. Sometimes complexity does a game good such as any MMO player would say they need to have their space cluttered in order to drink a certain potion or check to see comparisons between different items or buffs that are applies for each team member. Different interfaces do different jobs. Do they need massive amounts of clutter all the time though? Players would argue yes, but a horrified UI designer in me would ask “Isn’t there a better way?”

The answer is yes, but players would despise the change of simplification, and centralizing the interface. It really depends on what the game is trying to do. When ever this topic comes up the obvious comparison is that you want the interface to be seamless. Though each and every single developer would argue differently on implementation. Good UI sometimes must be seamless integrated, or if it is something that is meant to catch the attention of the user, then it must be created to break the traditional UI rules.

When it comes to building interfaces that are both worthwhile and experiential the design must be useful to users. If an interface does nothing for the experience and mechanically its not worth building. That seems like a no brainer, but there are many times in projects where an interface was designed and built for no reason other than the hallowed words to any designer, “because it looked cool.”