Chaos and Order

Sholom Sandalow, Friday, September 14, 2007 @ 5:30 pm

The process of designing (guis/websites/apps what have you) can be very exciting, and ultimately, when a design goes well and achieves its purpose, it can be highly rewarding.  But it's also a challenge.  Every designer has their own set of struggles that they go through during the design process.

One of the things I struggle with most as a designer is the urge I have to make things consistent, or symmetrical.  I prefer order over chaos, I'll admit.  I constantly have to catch myself from spending too much physical and mental energy on removing what I see as chaos, and replacing it with structure, consistency, balance and symmetry.  It's not that these aren't worthy goals, but my experience is that sometimes those characteristics aren't the key, or even an important element on a particular interface screen or widget.  In fact, in many instances I have found that what I consider order is quite an undesirable solution, or at least, not what the doctor ordered.  
By instinct I look at my work through a designer’s lens.  It is a macro view.  I see the overall structure of the interface.  I slave over task flows and wireframes, structuring them and fine tuning them so they please my aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities.  I judge them by their adherence to my design rules-symmetry, balance, structure, consistency.  
But for the judges that matter, the users, the interface is simply a tool that they will use to accomplish a task (or set of tasks).  They will judge its success not by any theoretical characteristics, but by how well it allows them to accomplish those tasks.  They won’t look at the blue prints.  They’ll never get a look at the task flows generated in the design process, nor would they have any desire to.  
Internalizing this distinction--the difference between my view, and the user’s view--and embedding it into my design process is one of the challenges I face, and one of the determinants of a successful design.

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user experience design

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