Design Strategy that Jingles

Overview

Have you ever thought about any design strategy that lifts the lid? A well-thought-out design strategy can remove or eliminate accessibility barriers for everyone. This strategy can be described as a concurrence of fundamental notions of design, principles of design, the 10 commandments of design, and design elements. The question now becomes: how does a designer implement this strategy? To explore this, these contents will be examined:

Fundamental Notions of Design
Design Principles
Nielsen’s 10 Commandments of Design
Elements of Design

Design is an interesting discipline that brings together imagination and reality. It imagines the interaction between an individual and the man-made environment as it interprets and considers factors, such as society, aesthetics, function, context, experience, and culture. Any design aims to create useful arrangements of elements that will benefit the user to achieve identified goals.

Some fundamental notions of design elicit balance between the individual and their environment.

Fundamental Notions of Design

User-Centric Approach

This aims to provide solutions based on the specific needs of the users and the user’s capabilities to efficiently use the solutions. The design begins with the needs of the individual and ends with a solution for the individual.

Holistic Analysis

The designers want to interpret the root cause that gives rise to the immediate problem by seeking to understand the user’s constant awareness of the problem, association with the problem, handling of the problem, how many times the problem is revisited, and finally, how to solve the problem.

Creativity and Economy

The designers want to maximize resources within their reach through creativity and thoughtful planning. Solving a problem through design should not put the user in so much debt. No end user should break the bank to acquire a tool or technology for living.

Design is considered a blend of creativity, purpose, and empathy and helps define and shape our world, and how we view it. Handy and accessible products are created through designers’ creativity, baked into the users’ lived experiences, and empathy. In the end, such products, or services give purpose and meaning to the end users.

Design Principles

Design principles are the guidelines, perceptions, symbols, and engagements that designers carefully consider and cultivate in their designs. Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) describes design principles as “fundamental pieces of advice for you to make easy-to-use, pleasurable designs.” Applying them helps you imagine how users will naturally react to your design.

The acronym “KISS” (Keep It Simple Stupid) is advocated when it comes to design principles and emphasizes the need for you to presume that your design is for a non-expert and thus, to reduce the scale of confusion your users may experience while interacting with your design.

Types of Design Principles

The design principles are like a visible temple of design that radiates balance, unity, similarity, order, cohesion, prominence, and elegance. It is a structure that has its foundation on design rocks. In other words, the design principles are the design rocks of any accessible product, service, or environment.

Visibility Temple showing different blocks, structures, human icons sitting and various colours with text: "hierarchy, balance, unity, contrast, dominance, and scale." — **Visibility Temple**

Visibility – Ensure that elements can be easily noticed. In this context, IDF identifies seven visual design principles:

Unity: Make your design harmonious.
Gestalt: Use proximity, similarity, or grouping to identify relationships between elements.
Hierarchy: Logically arrange and prioritize elements in your design.
Balance: Balance positive and negative spaces to have an evenly distributed design.
Contrast: Show cohesiveness in your design and use contrasts to make elements stand out or attract the user’s attention.
Scale: Maintain relative sizes of elements in your design when compared to other elements.
Dominance: Ensure that an element in your design composition has prominence or visual weight to attract the user’s view.

Findability – Can a user find information easily and quickly?

Learnability – Is it intuitive and comprehensible?

Perceived affordances – Are your cues meaningful, and can they suggest their purpose?

The Ten Commandments of Design

Designing a user-friendly system is not a given. It is an art displayed by conscious and articulated designers with empathy, vision, ingenuity, and public-spiritedness. Such socially conscious individuals speak the language of the users, understand their language, and they too understand them. This user-friendly design is better articulated in what Jakob Nielsen identified as the ‘ten commandments’ of design.

A tablet of stone with a caption "designing a user-friendly system."

Make users aware of the system status.
Maintain information in a logical, natural order.
Allow users some control and freedom.
Follow standards and maintain consistency.
Make your design error-free, if possible.
Allow recognition rather than remembering information.
Make systems flexible and efficient.
Implement aesthetic and minimalist design.
Provide plain-language error messages.
Offer easy help resources.

Elements of Design

Amoeba proteus is always known as a shapeless unicellular organism because of its form. It has a soft cell wall and a flexible cell membrane called plasmalemma that allows it to constantly change its shape as it forms pseudopodia. These pseudopodia help the amoeba to move around, feed, and engulf food particles through the process of phagocytosis.

Amoeba’s shapelessness is proof of its capabilities to adapt to its environment; when it retracts its pseudopodia, the amoeba becomes spherical, and this simple adaptation is one of the reasons for its survival in the aquatic environment. It can squeeze through tiny spaces to escape from other predatory organisms.

As I describe the life of an amoeba, I was wondering how it relates to design elements. One can argue that amoeba’s shapelessness is the reason for its survival. Conversely, the building blocks of any design are the seven elements of design. They include:

Shape: In design, shapes signify ideas or concepts. Shapes can signify mood, emotion, or control an eye’s direction around the design.
Color: In design, color is used to show light, depth, mood, and perspective.
Space: In design, space is the area a shape or form occupies as well as the background that makes it stand out.
Form: In design, form can be created by joining shapes and improved by color and texture.
Line: In design, a line is the starting point for all artistic design and can appear in different manners: broken, unbroken, implied, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, or curved.
Value: In design, value is the lightness or darkness of an object, and a change in the lightness or darkness of an object draws out a value shift.
Texture: In design, texture is conceived as the way a surface feels or appears, which can be visual and tactile.

As noted above, amoeba proteus is shapeless, but its shapelessness brings out its versatility and ability to survive in harsh environments. The seven elements of design are the building blocks of any design.

This writing claims that a good design strategy can blow off the lid or barriers that make accessibility of products, services, or environments difficult for all, or nearly impossible for some. Therefore, designing and implementing the strategies above is a thousand steps to making products, services, or environments accessible to everyone, regardless of their abilities.

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