When design experts talk about “usability,” they are really refering to design that works and makes sense from the user’s point of view. Early versions of Microsoft Office were designed from an engineer’s point of view, if often seemed. Every feature — and there were dozens of them — was a click or two away (30 toolbars!), hiding the small number of functions you actually wanted the program to perform.
But in Office 2007, Microsoft designers went back to the drawing board to build in “design tenents” that reflect how the user wants to use the product, says Harvard Business Publishing blogger Peter Merholz in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word. Microsoft nailed those tenents, as did TiVo before them.
Office design tenents included “reduce the number of choices presented at one time”, and “straightforward is better than clever” (Bye-bye ‘Clippy’). For TiVo, design prinicples included “it’s entertainment, stupid” and “”everything is smooth and gentle.”
Merholz, president of design firm Adaptive Path, says these design principles, what his company terms experience principles, “capture a core set of ideas (usually around 5-7) that merge a company’s brand values with opportunities for better serving customers. Again and again, we see these principles pop up in stories of great customer experience success (particularly where there’s no visionary leader, a la Steve Jobs, to drive design).”
What are the product or service design principles at your company? Do some repeat in everything you produce, or do they change from product to product?
