By Meriel
Categories: Experience strategy | User-centered design | UX Design
“They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.” Ronald Reagan
Behind the scenes, today’s products and services are very complex. As consumers demand ever improving customer service and more advanced functionality the complexity only increases. The challenge for design teams grows and companies struggle to create the increasingly important illusion of simplicity.
Complexity presents itself in many forms:
- Technology e.g. multiplatform, new technologies and platforms
- Legal e.g. FSA regulations, EU Directives, data protection, accessibility
- Stakeholder e.g. multiple teams, differing objectives
- User e.g. context of use, user needs, expectations and abilities
- Content e.g. quantity of data, specialist data
- Interaction e.g. balance between intuition, learnability and control.
As designers, we know it’s our job to help bring design projects through this complexity. I’m reminded of a great quote (by whom I don’t know):
“Sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes He calms the sailor“.
It’s the designer’s role to do a bit of both. We work in a highly collaborative way to calm ‘the sailor’ and make sure the team is able to make informed decisions. We also work in a user-centred way which enables us to calm ‘the storm’ by designing content and interactions appropriate to the user and the commercial context.
Sometimes interfaces we design are beautiful, some are purely functional some are invisible. We challenge ourselves to deal with complexity so that the end users don’t have to. That’s great design.
(Thanks to Lenny for use of his image.)
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