Good Design Three Ways
Expanding what "good" means in UX
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
When you hear the words “good design,” what comes to mind? For most people, it’s about visuals: slick graphics, beautiful type and layout. But visual design is only one small realm of design.
More broadly, design is about meeting people’s needs. The famous designer Charles Eames put it this way: “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”
This understanding of design suggests that a “good” design is one that accomplishes its purpose really well. But what, exactly, does that mean?
Good 1: Usability
In the world of computing, questions of good design have been central to the field of human–computer interaction since its inception (virtually by definition), and “good” design has been understood in terms of how well a computing system accomplishes its goals—which is to say, the user’s goals.
This has been termed usability, and this term has made the leap from academe into the broader culture. Usability represents a conglomeration of concerns like effectiveness (does the system actually do what it’s supposed to?), efficiency (is it faster than other methods?), learnability (how quickly can a user become proficient?), safety (is your arm going to get chopped off if you click the wrong button?), and so on.
As you can see, these concerns are fairly utilitarian and prosaic—unsurprising, then, that they emerged in an era when computers were used primarily in academic, military and (nascently) business settings.
These concerns were also influenced by the psychological theories in vogue in the early 1980s, as Daniel Fallman writes in his classic CHI paper offering a philosophical history of “good design.”
Such “information processing” theories emphasized individual cognition (taking in sensory information, processing it in the brain, and outputting clicks and taps) as the most perspective for designing computer systems. They ignored things like feelings, reflexive responses, the rest of the human body, social interaction and broader contexts. But it wasn’t long before scholars pointed out those limitations.
Good 2: Accessibility
On something of a parallel track to concerns about usability, elsewhere the world was beginning to wake up to the issue of accessibility—making things available to people with disabilities.
It started with the built environment and from a legal perspective in the 1960s amidst the Civil Rights movement. The basic logic was: If all citizens have equal rights to participate in our society, then the structures of our society should not exclude anybody. This means if someone is in a wheelchair, then access to City Hall cannot require people to climb steps. Hence we have curb cuts, ramps and elevators.
It wasn’t long before accessibility entered the informational and computing realms, particularly as using digital systems increasingly became requisite for participating in society. If someone is blind, then government information must be available in Braille or the spoken word. Considerations about technology were already included in the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, and relevant legislation was further developed in the 1990s.
You can perhaps already imagine how concerns about accessibility expand into what is now known as universal design or inclusive design. These approaches attempt to identify all sorts of barriers that people face in civic participation: language, demographics, technological literacy, historical prejudice, and on and on.
Under this view, good design is that which is accessible and inclusive.
Good 3: Ethics
But consider that you can have a really well designed murder weapon. Take your pick of which type. The philosopher Vilém Flusser considers this example in his wonderful little book The Shape of Things. Murder Weapon X could be eminently effective, efficient, learnable and safe (for the murderer, that is, alas not the victim); and it could be wielded by a person with any manner of disability. Yet we may rightly hesitate to call the thing “good.”
If Murder Weapon X sounds a bit farfetched, consider smartphones: sleek and no doubt wonderful for all sorts of purposes, and very accessible, yet wreaking havoc on our social fabric and individual cognition alike. There are many such examples.
In his classic paper I mentioned above, Fallman shares two ideas from the philosophy of technology that are helpful in acknowledging this kind of “good”:
A technology may seem good in one context but not in another, as identified by the philosopher Albert Borgmann. At root this is because many technologies end up replacing reality rather than supplementing it; for instance, recorded music is of higher quality than any particular performance, and social media is more engaging than any happy hour conversation.
Technology always mediates in non-neutral ways; as some possibilities are enabled and made visible, others are disabled and made invisible.
These ideas are increasingly taken for granted now. We have become widely aware of the moral effects that any technology has on us, and at multiple levels: individual, family, community, and beyond. And unfortunately, sometimes these levels are in conflict, and so our awareness of these issues doesn’t mean it’s any easier to ultimately agree on which technological implementations are good or best, especially on a global stage.
The bar for good design has been raised indeed.
Ports of Call
🏊: The Maltese ultra-endurance swimmer Neil Agius has completed a world-record ocean swim this week, swimming over 140 kilometers around the islands of Malta and Gozo. He was swimming for over 60 hours.
Giving and getting feedback: A useful clip from Andrew Huberman’s podcast with Adam Grant on how to give useful feedback, how to ask for it, and how to receive it well.
Beanie Babies: This week I learned that they’re making Beanie Babies again in the classic designs from the 1990s but with new colorways. Amazing that the price hasn’t increased much—I remember paying $5 each way back when, and now they’re $5.99.