Now that we’ve more-or-less defined “design,” since the working title of this series is Great Design, I better come up with a working definition of “great.”

Just about every product category has its blue-chip, gold-plated stars. Movie stars? Brad Pitt. Best rock song of all time? Sweet Home, Alabama, of course. Office chairs? The Herman Miller Aeron. Portable MP3 players? Clearly the Apple iPod.

What do these products have in common?

Brad Pitt can attract millions of people to the box office. He’s very good looking, and very charismatic, and it’s not even clear if he can act, but who cares?

Sweet Home, Alabama is one of the catchiest songs of all time. It’s extremely popular despite the fact that it’s impossible to sing or hum (the refrain requires harmony), the melody is awkward, and the lyrics include a couple of reprehensible lines defending Alabama’s racist and segregationalist governor George Wallace, but few people really notice the flaws, they just enjoy the song.

The Aeron chair became the symbol of high end office chairs. It’s expensive and looks like a giant cockroach, but when the directors of 24 need to show the canonical “super luxury office chair” for the White House, they use an Aeron.

And finally, the iPod. Ah, the iPod. It’s way more expensive than any competitive MP3 player. It has fewer features than the competition. The iPod nano, the tiny one that everybody’s raving about, is the only product I’ve ever seen that can be scratched beyond all recognition just by touching it lightly with your finger, and the shiny mirror back will be permanently covered in greasy fingerprint smudges from the moment you take it out of the elegant package until the battery wears out and you have to throw away the whole thing and buy another. But who cares?

The blue chip product in every category can usually be thought of as being popular despite obvious design flaws. Weird.

As the design gets better and better, as the product becomes more and more suitable to its users needs, it becomes more likely to be chosen by customers. So the 40GB MP3 player, all else being equal, will outsell the 20GB MP3 player. The easy-to-use phone will outsell the hard-to-use phone. All else being equal. That part is not weird.

But that only gets you so far, as Creative, makers of the unloved ZEN MP3 players, are learning the hard way. Despite having products that are better than the iPod by just about every reasonable metric, they are unable to even come close to Apple iPod’s dominant market share. They’re cheaper. They have more memory. They support more file formats. Etc. Doesn’t matter: they still have single-digit market share while iPod is probably in the 80s somewhere.

That’s because good design can only take you so far. Getting every aspect of the design perfect, making a usable product, making the right tradeoffs between price and functionality, between flexibility and ease of use, between weight and battery life, etc., etc., etc., is all really important, but the most it can possibly get you is to #2.

It’s like beauty. A wannabe model can be tall, with a perfectly symmetrical face, beautiful skin, lovely eyes, and perfectly straight white teeth, and still be considered unattractive. On the other hand, you can have a gigantic broken nose, or be completely lacking in eyebrows, or have a giant gap between your two front teeth, and still be People Magazine’s Sexiest Whatever of the Year.

How do you get to be #1? That’s the mystery here. And since certain markets (graphical operating systems, online auctions, and apparently MP3 players) seem to be winner-take-all markets, being #2 or #3 may not be good enough.

So this is what I’m talking about when I say “Great Design.” It’s that ineffable quality that certain incredibly successful products have that makes people fall in love with them despite their flaws. It’s extremely hard to pull off. I sure as heck can’t do it. But, if you bear with me, I think I have some theories as to what’s happening. While these theories do not exactly add up to a recipe for making good products into great products, they may give you a clue as to what’s going on when people go crazy about the Aeron chair or Julia Roberts.

Here’s the overall plan for this series of articles. First, I’m going to go through good design, namely, all the things you should know to get your design adequate given the current state of the art. Ease of use is a fundamental part of that so I’ll spend a lot of time on usability.

Later, once I’ve got all the obvious things taken care of, you’ll have a really usable design and one which meets your customers’ needs, and in fact, if you pay more attention to these usability things than your competitors, you may have the best design, but that’s not going to get you to #1.

“Every time I read Jakob Nielsen,” I wrote in 2000, “I get this feeling that he really doesn’t appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone’s number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you’d never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other.”

So in the final articles, roughly the last third of the series, I’ll peek under the covers at the black magic of great design. You may not be able to pull it off. It takes real talent, not just hard work. But at least I hope you’ll recognize some of the things that are going on that make certain gadgets, software, songs, movie stars, and office chairs make that leap from merely throroughly good to truly and significantly great.

 

OK, buckle down, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

In our last episode, I introduced the tentative title “Great Design” for this series of articles. I have something very specific in mind when I use the words “great” and “design,” and it’s worth spending some time defining it.

First, “design.”

You know those gorgeous old brownstones in New York City? With the elaborate carvings, gargoyles, and beautiful iron fences? Well, if you dig up the old architectural plans, the architect would often just write something like “beautiful fretwork” on the drawing, and leave it up to the artisan, the old craftsman from Italy to come up with something, fully expecting that it will be beautiful.

That’s not design. That’s decoration. What we, in the software industry, collectively refer to as Lipstick on a Chicken. If you have been thinking that there is anything whatsoever in design that requires artistic skill, well, banish the thought. Immediately, swiftly, and promptly. Art can enhance design but the design itself is strictly an engineering problem. (But don’t lose hope — I’ll talk more about beauty in future articles).

Design, for my purposes, is about making tradeoffs.

Let’s design a trashcan for a city street corner, shall we?

Let me give you some design constraints.

It has to be pretty light, because the dustboys, er, sanitation engineers come by and they have to pick it up to dump the trash in the garbage truck.

Oh, and it has to be heavy, or it will blow away in the wind or get knocked over. (True story: I once got in an accident because a trash can blew in front of our car. Nobody was hurt, not even the trashcan.)

It has to be really big. People throw away a lot of trash throughout the day and at a busy intersection if you don’t make it big enough, it overflows and garbage goes everywhere. When that happens, one of the little six-pack plastic ringy-dingies will get in the ocean, and a cute little birdy will get ensnared in it, and choke to death. YOU DON’T WANT TO KILL BIRDIES, DO YOU?

Oh, also, it needs to be pretty small, because otherwise it’s going to take up room on the sidewalk, forcing the pedestrians to squeeze past each other, which, possibly, when the Effete Yuppie Listening to His iPod gets distracted by a really funny joke on the Ricky Gervais podcast and accidentally brushes against the Strangely Haunted Vietnam-Era Veteran, can result in an altercation of historic proportions.

Ok, light, heavy, big, and small. What else. It should be closed on the top, so rubbish doesn’t fly away in the wind. It should be open on the top, so it’s easy to throw things away.

It should be really, really, really cheap.

Notice a trend? When you’re designing something, you often have a lot of conflicting constraints.

In fact, that’s a key part of design: resolving all of these conflicting goals.

The only goal that usually doesn’t conflict is the requirement that whatever you design be really, really cheap.

Every design decision involves tradeoffs, whether it’s finding space for all your icons on the toolbar, picking the optimal balance of font size and information density, or deciding how best to use the limited space for buttons on a cellphone.

Every new feature is a tradeoff, between the people who could really use such a feature and the people who are just going to get overwhelmed by all the options. The reason 1950s-era telephones were so much easier to use than modern office phones is that they just didn’t do much. Without voicemail, conference calling, three-way calling, and Java games, all you need is a way to dial numbers and hang up on the man claiming to be selling police benevolence.

By which I mean to say: even if you think your new feature is all good and can’t hurt because “people who don’t care can just ignore it,” you’re forgetting that the people who allegedly don’t care are still forced to look at your feature and figure out if they need it.

“How could a mute button on a sound system hurt?” After all, if you don’t want to waste time learning about the mute button, you can just ignore it completely, right?

No. Because at some point, someone will hit it by mistake, and no sound will come out of the speakers, and if they don’t know about “mute,” they’ll start trying to turn up the volume knob all the way, so when they do finally unmute the thing, the speakers will blow out with an ear-shattering boom that creates permanent, concave warps in each of the walls of the room where the sound system was installed (and a matching hump in the floor of the apartment upstairs).

And since the mute button takes up space on the control panel, now all the other control panel buttons have to be a bit smaller, making them harder to read, and there are more buttons, so the whole interface looks scarier. I swear, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t dare try to use the clock radio in a hotel room to wake me up. With all the options they have I can never quite tell if I’m setting the alarm clock to wake me up in time for my Very Important Meeting, or programming the damn thing to download the latest news from Mongolia on the half-hour.

“So,” you think, “simplicity, is that it?” No! I wish it was that easy!

Because without conference calling, you’re just not going to sell any office telephones.

If the nifty graphics application you developed doesn’t give users 16777216 choices for colors, you’re not going to sell a copy to Yale, which needs Yale Blue (Pantone 289) for all their documents.

You see? There are two requirements: lots of features and few features. Ah! And that is where the zen-like mystery of design comes in. When you’re designing, you’re satisfying lots of difficult constraints. One false move, and you fall into the abyss. It’s frigging hard to get this right. You think I know how to solve the Motorola RAZR phone power-switch button? Heck no! I’m sure that the design team over there spent weeks working on this. I’m sure that some engineer or team of engineers went to absolutely heroic lengths, staying up late and coming in on weekends, to make the RAZR keyboard light up right away when you press the ON button, even though you don’t notice this in daylight, because they know about the problem I whined about in the introduction and just couldn’t do anything about it because turning on a modern cellphone requires booting up a computer, and not a very fast computer, for that matter, before you can get things on the main screen to light up.

Design Adds Value Faster Than It Adds Cost

The Motorola RAZR is now selling at a rate of about four million units each month — 1.5 per second. If Motorola spends another $million or two improving the design, they can make it back in a day.

Design is something you only have to pay for once for your product. It’s a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That’s what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that “Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.”

(Footnote: AUTOS ON FRIDAY/Design; He Put a New Face on Chrysler, The New York Times, Published: February 9, 2001, by By JIM MCCRAW , Late Edition – Final, Section F, Page 1, Column 1)

That’s what makes it so important. By the time I’ve finished this series of articles, I think you’ll be utterly convinced that nothing matters more to a product’s success — whether it’s a software product, website, cell phone, or garbage can — than good design. And as for great design? Well, that’s coming up in the next installment. Stay tuned.

 

Confession: I’m afraid to turn off my cell phone.

Not because I’m afraid of being out of touch, mind you. Heck, I could care less if people can reach me. If you have something to tell me that’s so important it would be worth interrupting Will and Grace, well, I think I’d rather have another 30 minutes of ignorant bliss before I find out about it. That’s my motto: Will and Grace First, Earthquakes and Floods Later.

Here’s why I’m afraid to turn off my cell phone: because I can’t always seem to muster the brain cells necessary to turn it back on.

It has two buttons on it, a happy green button and a scary red button. They have funny icons on them that don’t mean very much to me.

You might think that the green button turns it on. Green means go, right?

Wrong.

I tried that. Nothing doing. I tried pressing and holding the green button, because sometimes these phones want you to press-and-hold so that you won’t accidentally take a picture of your ear, or disconnect the phone call in the middle of an important job interview, or whatnot.

It turns out it’s the red button that turns it on.

When you press the red button, usually, nothing actually happens, so you suspect you might have done something wrong.

It turns out that you have, actually, turned on the phone, and if you’re in a dark room, you would have noticed that the keyboard flashed when you turned it on. In a bright room, nothing happens for six seconds. That’s usually long enough to think that you’ve done something wrong. So that’s when I start trying the other buttons, like the happy green button. In any case, I wind up feeling frustrated and not in control of my life.

Once you do learn that the red button turns the phone on, and you don’t have to hold it, you start to get frustrated that the time it takes the phone to boot up and load the pretty background picture and get on the network is something like 30 seconds. That’s frustrating, too. It seems like in the Olden Days you didn’t have to wait for half a minute to turn on an appliance. There was a switch, up was on (unless you lived in Europe, where they had a terrible war and couldn’t afford appliances), you switched it, the thing went on and started spinning or shining or whatever it is that the thing was supposed to do. Instantly. End of story.

Indeed, it’s surprising just how many of today’s devices and gadgets and remote controls have actually made TVs, stoves, and telephones harder to use. Suddenly, bad computer user interface design is seeping into the entire world.

Six years ago, with the total dominance of the consistent graphical interface of Mac and Windows, it seemed like the state of the art in software UI design was getting pretty good. Nothing fabulous, mind you, but pretty good. You could sit down with a new Windows app that you’d never seen before and have a pretty good chance of being able to operate it correctly.

That’s when I wrote a book called User Interface Design for Programmers, thinking, great! It’s time to get everybody on the same page, here, about how we design user interfaces, and then life will be wonderful.

Unfortunately, that was about the same time as there was a huge wave of new consumer gadgets, and, of course, that web thing hit us.

The web didn’t really have a standard UI. You could make anything be a link. We didn’t have dropdown menus, so we made do with all kinds of differently-behaved simulations of dropdown menus.

Gadgets? Gadgets were even worse. They had tiny keyboards and tinier screens. Combined with rampant featuritis, these damn devices did more and more things but just figuring out how to do them took a degree in engineering (or a bright 12 year old, but slavery has been abolished, especially for 12 year olds.)

Maybe nobody told the people who design gadgets and gizmos and websites (and even software) that they need to work on their user interface skills.

So, this is their wake up call.

While most products were becoming increasingly incomprehensible, like the typical home entertainment remote control, with dozens of mushy little buttons marked “MTS” or “SURR” or “PTY” that nobody has any hope of understanding, something else was happening: a very few, very good designers were, somehow, coming up with truly great designs that were beautiful, easy to understand, fun, and which made people happy. You know who they are because those products became bestsellers. The Apple iPod. TiVo. Google. Even the Motorola RAZR, which is so hard to turn on, is, in most ways, a great design.

Over the next weeks and months, if all goes well, I’m going to write a series of articles right here, on this website, on UI design for the modern age. The whole series will be, tentatively, named Great Design.

If all goes well, we’re going to look at some of the original principles of good UI design, much of which I covered in the first book, and revisit them and see how they apply to today’s world of miniature gadgets, websites, and street-corner garbage cans.

Then, if we’re really lucky, we’re going even farther. We’re going to look at what it takes to make the leap from a servicable, decent product design to a Mindbogglingly Great, Earth-Shaking, History-Changing product design. I have some theories about that, too.