No Design is the Best Design

The first bit of this article is similar to Krug's "Don't Make Me Think" philosophy, but the proposed solution of "simple command prompt" seems strange to me.

The author gives an example of what a todo list app should do: 'Users should be able to press cmd+E and just type in "buy milk today #personal, high priority.'

But the issue with command line syntax is there's no discovery there. The syntax and keyboard shortcut are obvious to the author because they created this, but no one else would realize what's possible or not, without a whole lot of trial-and-error. Even Google's fairly simplistic query syntax has taken years for a small number of people to use, and for the majority they are still surprised that they can use a + or quotes.

The last bit is about task-centric design, which is also a tradeoff. You design for a common tasks, but this butts against the 80/20 rule in many applications that 80% of users use 20% of features, but for each user it's a different 20%.

Anyways, I think we have to be careful of reducing design to catchphrases based on a few anecdotes. Design is usually about tradeoffs, and is situation-dependent.

This is a simple blog post. Almost only text. You can't read it with a screen reader because all is loaded via JavaScript. Please stop this crap. Sincerely the open web.

This leads to a classic debate.

Not counting telepathy, the author has found the design that works best… for themselves. This could work well for many other people too, but that remains to be seen.

Switching to first person now:

The real question is, “What design works best for the target audience of my product?”

If my target audience is only me and others like me, then the author’s suggested design is the best.

But if we’re designing for a wider audience, we need to figure out if this works for them or not. For that we need to define the target audience, and then we need to figure out where we need to compromise. We can design for the middle of the bell curve, much to the chagrin of the power users at the edges. Or we can aim squarely for the power users and be too overwhelming for the mainstream. Or we could keep simple features for mainstream users front and centre, and progressively disclose advanced power user features only for those who signal intent. There are many ways.

Design is often about compromise. Often, when I see people proclaiming design as “good” or “bad”, I don’t take it seriously until they have investigated the reasoning behind the decisions. It’s always easy to second guess from an armchair and the internet has made it even easier.

> Users should be able to press cmd+E and just type in "buy milk today #personal, high priority."

Why command E? What does e stand for? Why should I press e when I just want to write a note? Why not command n? I think the author is mistaking things he is familiar with, with good design. It's not. Command e to write a note is horrible design.

Good design is more subtle and sensitive and on purpose.

Each and every software user-interfaces has it's own constraints. It can be solved with a goal in mind that this software has to be accessible first without accumulating much of user's time to get themselves learn about on how to use it.

It's a bit trickiest thing, that that we take UI design as an art-form like a painting. It is different, good painting will evoke user's emotions in many ways. Whereas software UI design doesn't, instead it is there just to get the functionalities clear and concise for the user to do their work. That being said, UI design is an art-form in itself if we try to master it.

I don't believe there's such a thing as "no design" design. It makes very little sense to me. There can be design with very simple and efficient flow but each individual interaction can (and probably should) be engineered.

E. g. where exactly to display the text, what should be the copy, how does the text input behave, where is it positioned and how does it all handle potential error, loading or any other state. To define all of these things and more is to design. Simple-looking visuals don't necessarily mean a lack of design.

Similar ideas discussed in The Best Interface is No Interface: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Interface-No-brilliant-technolog...

I like the underlying concept a lot (roughly, use technology to accomplish minimal-interaction user experiences). Practically, however, I think it's rather hard to accomplish because a lot of constraints/forces are going to incentive developers/companies to do what's easiest for them.

I wrote about Diskprices.com[1]. They've got a pretty awesome FAQ that cuts through the layers and sheds light on something I've always found as the root cause of too much design - i.e, modern corporations have too many full-time designers. If you study the history of corporate design, it wasn't the case at all.

[1] https://neil.computer/notes/the-design-of-diskprices-com/

Google Analytics dashboard is (and has always been) pretty bad design.

great post