Good design principles

As a Product Manager in my past life, I have often faced challenges with identifying ‘good design’. I have limited aesthetic sense, and that combined with lack of basic design principles meant that I often misjudged whether a screen was well designed.

As a run up to my MBA, I decided to read a couple of books and get slightly more familiar with the world of Product Management. As a result, I picked up Decode & Conquer.

In the first chapter, the book lists out 10 design principles, but doesn’t really explain the meaning of each (and I’m not sure if I agree with all). As I was going through those, I wanted to list out some of them and some of my own here in detail. For me, good design is:

1. Value adding (aka “useful”): It must add value to the user of the product. In other words, it must have utility. It should not exist simply for the sake of it.
2. Thoughtful: Follows from the previous point on utility. Good design must be thought-through (to the last detail as per the book).
   Example: WhatsApp has a “forward” feature, and on its web interface, it has been designed extremely thoughtfully since it is always thinking about the next step the user wants to do and doing the ‘most common next step’ for them automatically. A user often forwards a single message to multiple contacts. In the feature, once the user selects the message, the user can ‘type to search’ the contact, use the ‘enter to select’ the contact, and as soon as the user does so, Web WhatsApp auto-highlights the entire search text, allowing the user to ‘type to search’ the next contact.
3. Unobtrusive / understandable / simple (aka as little design as possible): While the design should be thoughtful, it must not be elaborate. It must be as simple as possible (, but no simpler? As Albert Einstein said.). I learned this the hard way I think through the ‘first B2C app’ that I PM’ed. I think the biggest takeaway was, that the design should either be ‘intuitive’ i.e. similar to something that is going on in the offline world (or in some cases from an alternate product already used by target users) and just replicated in your product, or it should be a feature that the user naturally ‘evolves’ into.
   Example: Instagram’s “double tap to like” feature for comments was a natural evolution from its “double tap to like” feature for its posts. Yes, in the first place, the feature for its posts took time to be learned and hence there was always an “alternate” option to simply tap on the “heart” logo, and it still exists. But the power users mostly use the double tap feature which is less obtrusive.
4. Honest: Taking this one from the book directly. My inference of this, based on the examples in the book, is that it applies primarily to data and designs around data capture and flow. That is, the data that we capture should have credibility.
   Example: At Rivigo, we had a “pickup adherence” metric which used only time but not location to check whether the driver reached the pickup location on time. This design was flawed since it allowed the driver to mark “reached” while located far away from the actual pickup location. I improved this design by capturing both the client’s location as well as the driver’s location and then allowing the driver to tap the button if he was within the vicinity. Even better design is what Uber has implemented (and frankly only possible if the locations are known with high accuracy), that is auto-recording the data and alerting the rider that the cab has arrived, with the option for the driver to “remind” the rider.

Some points mentioned in the book such as “innovative” follow from a combination of 1 and 2 I believe. Innovation is nothing but designing from “first principles” (which is a combination of 1 & 2 in my head).

Back to reading!