Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013

Note: Dear readers, take this post with a grain of salt. It was written before I even was a student at the University of Michigan School of Information. Heady times indeed…

“Design is how it works,” say Steve Jobs, differentiating design from the veneer of decoration. But what does it really mean? It means primarily that design is a solution to problem. But secondarily it also means that form does not follow function, nor vice-versa: form and function are mutually enabling.

An example: the iPod click wheel.

A circle enables functionality that is not available to other forms, such as a triangle or a square. With a click wheel, the user scrolls smoothly through their library of songs by gliding their thumb around the circle. The software furthers enhances the experience by accelerating the speed of the scrolling according to the speed of the circling gesture. Thus an excellent design provides an elegant and delightful solution to a problem (scrolling through a music library on a tiny screen).

Bad design offers a solution to a non-existent problem, or it offers a poor or complicated  solution to a real problem.

 

An example:

 

 

The above image is of an mp3 player called the iHP-120 made by iRiver, and it was the music player I used for a couple of years in the 2000’s.  Notice that iRiver opted for a design that was more joystick-like in nature, with the knob in the middle limited to four directions. For the use-case scenario of scrolling a large library of songs, this design presented some issues. Frequently my thumb would slip off the knob in the middle while I was trying to scroll down. Secondly, there was no way of expressing “momentum” and thus the software could not accelerate in response to such momentum. A poor design choice impedes the functionality of the device – it doesn’t “work” as well as it could.

 

My goal in designing interfaces is to make a design that “works” – not a design that is simply a veneer, but a fundamental expression of a function. It should be impossible to clearly distinguish between form and function when design just works.

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