Picture this.

You’re designing a form but the questions are complicated. Users need a lot of guidance to understand each question. But this makes the page long and messy.

You run through various patterns.

‘Tooltips!’, you say to yourself.

And that’s cool because tooltips keep things clean while allowing users to access extra information. You polish the designs, get them ready for dev and you go to bed happy.

At least until you do some usability testing.

Now picture this.

You’re designing a form but the questions are complicated. Users need a lot of guidance to understand each question. But this makes the page long and messy.

You run through various patterns.

‘Tooltips!’, you say to yourself.

But this time you have 4 design principles to course-correct any potential bad decisions at the offset. After running tooltips through each principle you realise that they fail 2 of them:

• Good design makes things obvious
• Good design puts users in control

This used to be a conscious process for me.

But now it’s subconscious.

And that’s because I didn’t start with design principles. The design principles emerged after watching 100s of people struggle to use the things I designed. Every struggle failed at least one principle.

After years of doing this, they’ve become second nature.

These are tried, tested and timeless.

Wow each of those words starts with T so they must be good.

Here they are:

Principle #1: Good design works for everyone

There are many reasons for this principle but my favourite is that designing for a minority makes things better for everyone.

Examples:

• Subtitles don’t just help deaf people; they allow people to watch a video in a loud cafe
• Plain language isn’t just easier to read for people with low literacy; experts find it easier to read too
• Large radio buttons don’t just help people with motor impairments; everyone finds them easier to click

Principle #2: Good design makes things obvious

Chris Pratley, founder of OneNote said “You know you have a good design when people say ‘oh yeah, of course’ like the solution was obvious”.

Examples:

• Instead of using a hamburger menu, just show the navigation items and let them wrap if necessary
• Instead of using sticky menus, just let users scroll and put calls to action in context
• Instead of hiding hint text in tooltips, just show the hint inline

Principle #3: Good design puts users in control

Design for real life. People prefer to interact in different ways. And we should design for both an idealised work flow as well as when things don’t go to plan.

Examples:

• Instead of expecting users to fill out a form in one go, expect them to get interrupted and let them save and finish later
• Instead of showing a menu on hover, show it on click
• Instead of infinite scrolling, let users paginate

Principle #4: Good design is lightweight

According to Google increasing the page load time from 1 to 3 seconds increases the chance of abandonment by 32%. Go to 6 seconds and the chance goes up by 106%. Slow interfaces cause stress and feel untrustworthy.

Examples:

• Kill the background video and prioritise the content and flow
• Kill those tooltips and reduce the content to its irreducible core
• Kill that carousel and show the content inline