BN Manifesto. The principles of good interface design
An interface designer is a new person in a new world. There is a lot of ambiguity in what is the role of this person in the software development lifecycle and what is the best way to approach one’s duties.
by Slava Tarasov Psychology
Interface design is an amalgam of multiple disciplines: graphic design (typography, color theory, rules of composition), psychology (cognition theories), technology (IT), and business (microeconomy). As this understanding, to some extent, is correct it is also way too narrow and rather utilitarian while lacking an understanding of important underlying ideas.
Historically design has always been closer to art and, as an art, it has always been a second-class citizen compared to science. Starting from medieval education tradition universities had PhDs (Philosophiae doctor) for medicine, law or theology, while arts were having Masters degree (those titles were interchangeable back then, but in most countries PhD now is more advanced, let’s say scientific, degree). The core outputs of this situation are:
- designers are lacking an interdisciplinary connection with philosophy, thus losing connection with rich intellectual tradition;
- designers are approaching their craft rather tool-oriented, neglecting crucial foundational principles.
Thus, we believe that to master design one must know and understand the broad foundation of the craft.
Loving what we do
Post-Roman Western intellectual tradition was heavily dominated by Christianity, all the scientists of the time were scholars, hence the name of the philosophic branch — scholasticism. Since the end of an era of domination of religious dogmas in all the areas of life, most of the scholastic ideas are not much of use — the very method of applying to greater power in any craft is quite unpopular in modern and post-modern, rather secular, societies.
Though there is one area that is still highly connected to medieval thought tradition — contemporary ethics, which is strongly connected to what’s right and what’s wrong from a Christian’s point of view.
Mostly the implications of this understanding of moral behavior would be similar to any other activity and quite straightforward: it is considered unethical to design a heroine e-shop, and it’s even straight-forwarder as this activity would be illegal. And those examples are quite universal, though there is a design branch that is unique for the profession and rather unregulated — the usage of cognitive psychology against the users to the benefit of product stakeholders. The principles used for this activity are widely called Dark Patterns. Those could be quite efficient in short-term monetary terms, but never were (and will never be) design mainstream or best design practice mostly because of the echo of ancient ethical tradition.
There is also one interesting aspect of Christian beliefs, the ones that solidified the foundations of the concept of labor. Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, pointed out the religiously caused difference between Continental Europe and American work traditions — Americans at the beginning of XX century mostly adhered to the protestant understanding of work and its place in life, which we completely aligned with:
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. Good designers love their craft.
But the biggest claim of Christianity is the crucial importance of love. We believe in love — good designers love themselves; their craft; their clients; their colleagues, and, last but not least, good designers have to remember that interfaces exist only when there is a user, thus, good designers love users.
Philosophiæ Naturalis
Classical rationality is probably like many other things in the Western world started from Ancient Greeks. People should have established a relationship of causality long ago (e.g. correlation between moon cycle and crop yield), though it was ancient Greeks who documented and widely popularised simple predicate logic.
But even if the seeds of rationality were Aristotelian, humanity had to wait more than a thousand years for the Rationality Kingdom to arise. The time and the place were Great Britain from the Stuarts to Queen Victoria: first industrial revolutions, the dominance of “natural philosophy”, steps towards secularism. In interface design, rationality is always brought to light for each decision made.
AB testings, focus groups, click & eye-tracking heatmaps usage for layout testing, etc. are derivative to the scientific method and have a strong philosophic basis: everything is rational in terms of causality relationships, and with appropriate methods, one might predict the results of any action.
Understanding the limitations of the deterministic scientific approach we believe that good designers utilize any piece of data available.
Understanding systems
In a pure rational context, it’s obvious that everything could be predicted. Also, the Enlightenment era came to the conclusion that tradition is something for the previous generations, Ancient Greece is not a golden ideal,— Progress is defined and embraced.
Hence, thinkers of the time postulated, there should be the System of everything — the one and the only best way to describe philosophy, ethics, physics, mathematics, history, and even God. And the most famous attempt on the route to building such a system was the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his Phenomenologies, Hegel invented a unique dialectic method that allowed him to describe basically everything: the reason for existence, the role of the deity, rationale for freedom, and theory of evolutionary development — you name it.
The Great System dominated the intellectual field for half of the century, quite the same way Scrum-alike methodologies currently dominate the software development industry and spread quite fast through the other business domains.
Beliefs that there is the best system, mixed with the spreading of national identity concepts through Western Europe bring us modern totalitarian states. Of course, it is a rather low blow and overstretches: to blame adepts of unification for the atrocities of totalitarian regimes, but, for us, it’s enough to project the essential lesson:
There is no best system for everything — good designers will never blindly follow any framework.
The core of the Scrum framework is the idea of being “agile” — which is strongly connected to the concept of post-Hegelian thinker Herbert Spencer, who had applied Darwin’s theory formulated in one of most brilliant insights into mechanisms of nature — the “On the Origin of Species”. One had to fit the environment to outran competition for survival.
And the very idea of something to be able to adapt faster than competitors to survive and thrive is derivative of the Hegelian conception of evolution, formulated by the thinkers of the 19th century.
“Survival of the fittest '' is quite a carnivoran statement, and one should never think of life as a zero-sum game, though this approach embraces the idea that systems (societies, nations, humankind, etc.) should improve with the pace of time. Thus, good designers are constantly improving.
Comprehensive guide towards GULAG
One of the most important branches of the dialectical method was the result of practical usage of the Hegelian System’s evolution — Class Theory, where Karl Marx had added material to the historical method of Hegel. And using this philosophical basis Marx created a rather comprehensive and at first glance quite just conception of a classless society.
Though there is one thing that makes Marx the most toxic thinker in the modern world (and that’s not an easy task, to outperform Nietzche and Heidegger in this niche) — and the thing that gives Marxism its unparalleled ugliness is practice:
- USSR and it’s monstrous inequality that was masked under the declared fairness with it’s the most horrible practice of GULAGs and physical destruction of the very classes, millions of people;
- The Republic of China and its forced labor camps for Uygurs with the highest amount of death sentences among all the other nations;
- Police state of North Korea and basically everything that happens there.
The core issue of Marxism conception to my belief is that it tries to force people to uncharacteristic behavior (like sharing all property or continuously improving without fair competition).
Designers are often trying to do something similar: to force in one route instead of creating a flexible framework; to restrict semi-optimal behavioral patterns instead of rewarding optimal ones. The managers, trying to push their methodologies to the teams where there are no conditions for usage of these are basically doing the same. That’s how you will end up with users or/and colleagues hating you and your product because the only thing you get using Marx’s blueprints is GULAG.
Good designers provide value instead of imposing restrictions.
UX Design is dead and we killed it
As mentioned earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche is probably one of the most controversial thinkers of all time. This might be not completely fair, as his works are widely primitivized and misinterpreted. And it is important to be precisely clear on that matter: there is no way to exist for any valid thought concepts that would justify default inequality and Nietzsche never intended to create one. While reading brilliant works of Nietzsche one must be extremely careful with interpretations.
The first concept to note here is the idea of Will as the dominant power for any activity. The importance of will should be extremely important for any design manager; there is no methodology that is able to provide results with the teams that are unmotivated, purely driven by process.
The Will to deliver is essential and prime to any other predicates of success — good designers are passionate and proactive.
The other important idea to keep in mind is the need to question the foundations of your field once in a while. As one doesn’t have to bring higher power while investigating the universe, likewise one doesn’t have to presuppose the existence of any concept despite its popularity. E.g. while designing the interface one should remember that even if there is user experience, there is no UX design. Designers who believe that they are creating an experience are focusing on the external instead of their product — interface, that’s why people are often tolerating unaesthetic, suboptimal, clumsy interfaces. And if you don’t believe me, check a tweet from Alan Cooper: “There is no such thing as UX design”.
Either Or
The essential founder of post-modern understanding of the world is Søren Kierkegaard, his theological investigations with a cold and ironic critique of the Hegelian System inspired existentialists for the next century. His ideas could be interpreted as an a-rationality of religious feeling and incompatibility of ethical, aesthetical, and religious. Thus one must always make choices, like Bible’s Abraham decided to follow his beliefs and (was going to murder his only and beloved son) was having to discard ethics; likewise, any person has to make choices that are mutually exclusive — Either or, like Kierkegaard would say. The final incompatibility of some choices inside one system, without the possibility of synthesis could be a major takeaway out of Kierkegaard’s theological investigations.
I would highlight two interesting connections to designers' behavior in this context: sometimes you don’t have the ability to introduce everything to your product or merge different ideas into new (synthesis) ones; some ideas are mutually exclusive and one has simply to make a choice.
Good designers understand and are not afraid of responsibility to choose.
Dasein is care
A natural continuation of making a choice is a consequence of the non-existence of something that was not chosen. And the man for the investigations of (not)being is Martin Heidegger (ironically he analyzed Dasein, “being there” in German, which sounds much like the “Design” we are connecting it with).
Exploring Being Heidegger stated that to understand existence one must start with itself — the one who is trying to understand — the human being. This rather simple idea supports two main pillars of contemporary interface design:
- any design decision of any level must start with understanding the context of human beings: what result will people get out of this design artifact, how people will interact with it, how people will implement it, how people will fund it, etc;
- designers are not creating solutions, rather revealing those in the darkness of probabilities with their act of clearing revelation or Lichtung;
The result of choosing in the universe of choices is the situation where you have an infinite number of Not’s, because of decisions you’ve made. And a clear understanding of the vast amount of discarded opportunities results in the understanding of the burden of making the right decision. Weaker people would like to shield themselves from this stress: they would bring data and all their fancy stickers and schemes to tell that they have proof to support decisions made. Though, if one would try to be true to itself, it’s obvious that there still is a burden of interpretation and there is absolutely no way not only to avoid responsibility but even to make it lighter.
But Heidegger's Anxiety is actually a good thing because to be anxious about missed opportunities means to care. And care is the mandatory prerequisite for a profession:
Good designers care deeply about their products and the results of the choices made.
There is nothing outside the text
As one of the contemporary greatest philosophers, Nelly Furtado postulates: “All the good things come to an end”, and modern philosophy with all its heights and depths was unable to fit the ever-changing world forever. Old structures evolving into something new, after-, or post-, hence updated humanity produced an upgrade to intellectual tradition: postmodern (or poststructural) philosophy.
Brilliant French author Jacques Derrida (probably the most influential poststructuralist) performed unprecedented research on communication methods, he deconstructed (his famous method) all philosophical investigations to the tool used to describe each thought meaning — a language (and its physical representation — text).
Derrida used Witgenstein’s idea of prerequisite to an ability of an idea to be communicated and expanded to its dramatic peak: since the understanding of a sentence means understanding a language. Hence there is nothing outside context, and it’s impossible to be absolutely precise on what you would try to communicate (because of the inability to suppress additional senses). In this path, one should clearly understand that lorem-ipsuming mockups are an insult to the profession — letters have numerous amount of senses when assembled in meaningful words, and this kind of suppression is mischief misleading.
Derrida’s thoughts are leading us towards the conclusion: every statement is a lie (not in a Machiavelian sense, but by default as the systematic character of any language).
Thus the best way to communicate is to suppress all the other meanings. In this context, good designers are constantly reducing the complexity of their designs.
