The Relationship With Design

User Experience July 05, 2008

When I tell people I'm a designer, their initial reaction is that I make things look pretty, which is entirely inaccurate. In fact, I don't do that at all. I mean sure, I can make pretty layouts and interfaces, but design goes way beyond that.

Design has its roots in psychology, which, in turn has its roots in biology (which one might argue is essentially math). So design is not about aesthetics but rather a deeper understanding of the human condition and the way we go about the world.

The relationship between a user and something that has been designed is much like any relationship you'd see person to person. Think about how you go about forming a relationship with someone and you start to see the parallels.

Step 1: Sensory Encounter

When you first meet someone, you can only judge based on physical appearance and/or sound. That is, you can see what they look like as well as how they speak. Your sensory input is primarily through your eyes and ears (although the nose may play a role, depending on if the person you've just met is clean or not). Nevertheless, you have a sense of the person, surface-level only.

This is quite similar to the initial sensation you would get from looking at a product or interface. Your first line of judgment is purely physical and sensory. Does it look good? sound good? smell good? taste good? feel good? These are the judgments you unconsciously or consciously make and these affect your first impression and whether or not you continue to explore or back off.

Step 2: The Interaction

When you start speaking to a person, regardless of your previous impressions, you begin to build an interaction with them. The interaction can depend on a variety of things, especially the behavior of others. Over time you will no doubt characterize the person by applying a variety of personality traits such as being nice, funny, sarcastic, etc. These things, of course, may not have been evident in your initial sensory stage.

And like how these things evolve over time as interaction progresses, so can your experience with a product as you spend time using it. Is it fun to use? Easy to use? Helpful? Useful? Do you feel good using it? Etc. And if you may have had one judgment call on the sensory stage, this interaction phase can alter it for the worse or better. If something looks bad and is hard to use, this is most likely where you'll call it quits. On the other hand, if it looks great but is hard to use, or the reverse, you need more information to make a firm decision.

Step 3: The Strategy

Behind any well-thought-out decision is a core concept or set of concepts; a soul. And this part may not ever be noticed by the end user, though it essentially drives everything else about the product. My friend Demian describes the idea as the soul (strategy/concept) driving the brains (functionality/interaction) which drives the voice (interaction/visual).

As humans - or just any semi-intelligent lifeform - we seek to identify, classify and define. That's just the nature of life. And so in everything we do as we interact with the world and learn new things, we're constantly following this path from surface to strategy, forming opinions and definitions along the way in order to gain a fundamental understanding of what something is.

That is the psychology. That is design.

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