How to tell good design from bad

How easily does a person return to the interface and understand it after a break? If the user went on vacation and after returning cannot remember how to use the work program, this is a bad interface.

Preventing errors

How well does the system help a person avoid mistakes? A simple example: a user incorrectly enters a query in the search, and the interface corrects it. Or if a person needs to enter a date of birth, we can prohibit entering incorrect values. You can expand this point into three steps: the first is to tell you what the problem is and where to fix it, the second is to prevent you from making a mistake, the third is if an error occurs, you need to help fix it. How easy it is for a person to return to the interface and understand it after a break ? If the user went on vacation and after returning cannot remember how to use the work program, this is a bad interface.

Satisfaction

How well did you work on the visuals of the interface? If we combine all four criteria with an aesthetically pleasing visual design, make clear error messages and prompts, and work on the tone of communication, we can increase user satisfaction with our interface.

You will not be able to pump all five parameters of your interface at once. Therefore, you need to prioritize: find out what is most important to users in your interface, and put emphasis on it. And then, in the process of operation, to refine all the secondary factors.

Why are edits happening?

I understand perfectly how you feel when you receive a task. When I was working as a designer, any task that fell into my hands caused a surge of inspiration. I wanted to sit down immediately and draw what I thought would be perfect for the client.

And I spared no time and effort to create really beautiful sites, applications, banners. But when I sent the mock up to the client, I got a bunch of incoherent and meaningless comments in response. All this terribly killed motivation, and of course, in the end, after all the iterations, I used to be ashamed to show someone the resulting layout.

Why did it happen? Because there is a global mistake in all this – I immediately sat down and drew something. Imagine an analogy: you want to build a country house, give a task to an architect. And he instantly shows you the finished, finished house. Of course, you will not be able to accept his work, he did not agree with you on the layout of this house, did not explain why it would be exactly like this, did not show the functionality of his solution.

How to avoid edits

In this post, we talked about the criteria for good design. This will help you feel confident when you need to explain a solution to a customer. But in order to forever forget about useless edits, you need to correctly build the process of working on tasks, establish interaction with the research department, product team and the customer (the person who accepts your work). In addition, you need to be able to reasonably prove your point of view to colleagues and customers.

Source: Contented