Good design isn’t about being clever

Imagine you’re a race-car driver, and it’s the first day your team is testing the new season’s car. Upon your brief inspection, it looks identical to the last season’s model. After a few laps of driving it around the track, you notice it can brake later and carry more speed through the corner leading to faster lap-time.

Despite not understanding why the car has less aerodynamic drag and more mechanical grip, you can tell it’s faster.

In the same way, users typically don’t dissect why a design is superior or subpar but can detect the difference.

Power of conventions

Users of your product will expect to have initial knowledge of its function. When I use a door-knob, I expect to twist it to the right to open the lock. When I use an iOS app, I expect to swipe to go back.

You should rarely design experiences to counter-act these reinforced assumptions. Imagine if you shipped a laptop with a DVORAK keyboard layout instead of QWERTY. Technically, it’s more efficient. However, 99% of the users would need to unlearn decades of typing experience for a marginal gain. Of course, this is an obvious example.

Think about the opportunity cost of swaying away from accepted conventions: is it worth the potential upside?

When conventions fails

Let’s look an icon that is in almost every iOS app, the three-lined hamburger menu. Here are the different purposes I have seen in many apps:

1. Primary navigation. Example: Path, Facebook
2. Action sheet with additional controls for the track. Example: Spotify
3. List of selected items. Example: App Store “Wish List”
4. Reorder the cells in a table view. Example: Phone, Music on iOS
5. Collection of users. Example: Twitter for Mac

When that icon is used, I have no idea what to expect. Its meaning keeps changing. It’d be like getting into a car and the A/C icon would illuminate the headlights.

Photo Credit: Bill Williams

You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. — Richard Feynman

Breaking out of conventions

Creating non-conventional UI’s

Sharpen your intuition