My perspective on design — what makes a design Good or Bad?

When we or anyone talk about design, the first thing that comes into mind is — something that is eye-pleasing, something that looks good looks pretty. But the design is more than making things look prettier. You have also heard people saying “OMG the design of this product is cool and I want to own it”. What made them fall in love with the design of the product? Is there something that comes along with the design?

Well! what is Design? According to Charles James “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose”

Now, what it means is that every design has its own purpose. Meanwhile, it also depends upon the context. A design with a purpose makes it more realistic also more logical. The design makes things organized. Design is also a way of communication, it is something through which you can share your emotions, experiences, and whatever things that you feel. It is commonly said that while we talk with our language things talk with their design. A designs talks, it expresses the emotions.
Also, the purpose of the design seems fulfilled when you find people understand what you want to convey through your design like you can convey what you want to — through your writing skills but Design has the power to represent all these things in fewer words without talking too much. In the end, we can say that design is the result i.e. things we see, hear, and feel.

What makes a Design good or Bad?

As we already discussed that every design has its purpose, your design seems more fuller when it comes to a purpose, it solves a problem and makes you feel better. So, is there some set of parameters that makes a design good or bad? Can we have a set of things that actually make a difference in our design?

Well! yes, there are some sets of things that bring a difference in your design. when designs come with this set of things there is the highest probability that it can be accepted by the mass as a good design. I would like to bring your attention to some of the aspects given by Dieter Rams for a good design and will point out some of my views on it.

1. A Good Design is a Useful One

Keeping the function of the product fixed, a good design adds to the usefulness of the product. While people will be using the product for the same purpose but with an addition to their experience — a better experience.

A good example we can see here. Things that are needed in a brush are only the brushing bristle along with a handle, right? but look at the rubber grip and the rough surface. it not only adds to the design of the brush but also gives you a better experience of brushing by adding value to it.

2. Understanding Product is Way Easier with a Good Design

Let me put two images and then you can clearly understand what makes the design good and why should we call it a good design.

So the image is a user interface of a kind of app where we will have to select the year. Take a look at the first image and you can be confused whether there are years other than 2011, 2012, 2013, or not. If you want to select 2015 how could you find it? In the first go, you may get confused. But this is not with the 2nd image, anyone can understand by looking at the design that we need to swipe left or right to find out the years other than what is on the screen.

3. People Love to Go with The Honest Designs Like They Love to be With Honest People

People have their own behaviour. They can be honest or dishonest. but what as a human we expect from other people is that they should be honest to us, and phycology wise we like to hang out with people who are honest like nobody wants to be with a dishonest person. The same is with the design, if the design is not justifying, if it is not honest to their users, this is most likely to be discarded by the majority of the people as a good design. Take a look at these images.

The example shows you two watches from the company Fastrack while the 1st one is original, the 2nd one is a copy. The original watch has its own specific properties like strap quality, build quality and design which makes it unique and adds to the user experience. On the other hand, copy products are made up of low-quality materials just to fake the original ones. Faking something in front of your user will definitely neither convenience them nor excite them but it may give them a bad experience.

4. A Good Design Should be Aesthetic.

Like I said design has a purpose, you always keep your user in your head before presenting any design. You know that your design is going to be used by thousands of people but what if it is not solving their problem, it’s not as according as they want. So it’s better to keep yourself in the shoes of your user before creating a design looking cool. So once you are done with the usefulness of the product — the aesthetic quality will provide extra marks to the design.

Two regular use glasses in our home, we often use these glasses for drinking purposes. No doubt they are fulfilling the need they are made for and exactly we should always keep in the first point our mind — The usefulness of the product. Once it is done then we can add an aesthetic design to the product (like the 1st example) that will not only make it looks good but also feel good. The 2nd glasses is not a bad design actually but if we compare these two in a single frame on the parameter of looks obviously the first one holds good marks in front of the second one that making it an aesthetically good design.

5. Innovative One is The Good One

From a cave to a high-tech home, from a steam engine to high-speed bullet trains, from flying balloons to supersonic jets, we have evolved ourselves in every aspect of our life. what took us to this level? “Innovation” we as a human have always tried to make things perfect, better than the last one. We improve things and replace them with the new version — a better version. So we also try these things with the designs, we improve them, enhance them and that makes a design “A Good Design”.

These two umbrellas are good examples to show you how innovation makes things more advanced. They will be doing the same thing i.e. to keep you safe out of the rain. But the first umbrella is not only technically advanced but is also advanced design-wise. It is compact, foldable, easy to carry, and lightweight. While the other one is not foldable, yes easy to carry but a little bulky to handle and since it is made up of wood and some other materials, it makes the umbrella a little heavier than the first one.

6. Durable Designs are Accepted by Mass

The quality of the product is the most important thing everybody looks at. Even I whenever to go for any purchase, I do look upon the quality of the product. you have probably heard the idiom “Not everything that shines is gold” and as usual there is product in the market which are good with their looks, aesthetically designed but they fail to convince the use due to their poor quality. These kinds of things often get deteriorate in less time and hence they add to their user a “Bad experience”.
we as a consumer always want our product to be long lasting, after all, we spend our money on that product, so it should be “value for money”. also if you look at our eco-system there are designs and some are totally mesmerizing but their life span is so small because nature knocks out such designs from the system. After all, they are not durable, they are not stable. Very soon you will find they have become rare or gone extinct.

Here I will share with you my experience of using these two belts. the first one is made up of leather and the other one was look-a-like leather when I bought it. I bought it because of the cool design in it, but soon the look-a-like leather belt went tired and after 2 months this is in a condition like this. obviously, the material used was not durable and so was the design. While the second one is long-lasting and can survive up to more time. People love to go with such types of products.

7. Design Less to Design More

From the start of the day we entered into the age of the internet, people are consuming a lot of content daily. companies and organizations are competing to attract a chunk of users for themselves. They use different marketing strategies to do this, to have the attention of the people who can be their potential users in the future. As of now, if you search for something on the internet, you will find hundreds of related articles and videos over there, moreover, the attention span of people is getting shorter day by day, so anything cluttered in the design, over-information and putting things un-organized can take your potential consumer away from your product.
well! Design plays a key role in such scenarios. The design has the power to express to people what you want to convey, it has the power to talk with people without saying a single word. so keeping in mind what you want to convey to the people — making a design neat and clean, uncluttered restricting over-information may help you position better in the crowd.

Over-information or Over design confuses the people. People are already overwhelmed with their own issues. own works. If your design is unorganized, information is put in such a manner that it really put pressure on the observer’s mind. This will not work and unfortunately, you’ll lose the attention of the observer. So this is is a disaster with your design and you fail as a designer.

8. Rethink — If Your Design is Bothering Users

Have you ever used free Apps downloaded from the android play store? if you have any such apps on your android device you can see googles ads that are running every time in your app. some are banner type and some just pop up to your screen.
while popping up ads just appear for some time, banner ads remain there every time with different ads. some times they are placed so wrongly that they often hide the main buttons and irritate us. it bothers you every time you use the app. You often try to remove it but it re-appear every time users open the app at the same position. A negative experience is built with it and people will always try to get rid of such apps.

Three examples which we often experience with some of the android apps in our daily life.
A Good Design — Because people are getting what they want with the app. Ads are secondary so it’s better to put them in a place that doesn’t bother them.
A Bad Design — a really bad design because ads are placed over the content. it seems like ads are primary which people do not want every time.
A Bad Design — Because there is a button on the screen which overlaps with the ads. People will get bothered when trying to press the button.

9. Detailing Will Give Your Design a Different Touch

Do you know we are evolved from chimpanzees, snakes are evolved from reptiles, they used to have legs a million years ago, Whales were used to be a land animal? Evolution is inevitable. But, why am I talking about this?
The thing towards which I want to bring your attention is — Nature Designs Itself. All the elements in nature evolved during their period to their best design to survive and to be in the reproduction system. Anything of no use will go extinct like the legs of a snake. Nature is so detailed with its design.
Detailed designs are highly admired. Putting anything anywhere in your designs of no use kills it. Paying attention to every part of your product or design shows the care for the user. it should be balanced whether with structure, looks and all that.

Have a look at these two headphones. while everything is ok with these two headphones like sound quality, looks, battery performance, one important is missing in the second headphone. The encircled part shows you what’s wrong with the design. This part is something that helps headphone wires durable otherwise there is a chance that the wire can go torn. Adding this important detail part will definitely ads a good experience to their user and one should always keep such things in mind.

10. Good Designs Contribute Environment

As a designer, we should always try to preserve our environment. A good design and the designer should have the ability to use minimum resources to profit maximum. end products are said to be more ethical if built with the use of minimum resources. It will not only build an environment-friendly product but will also be cost-effective. We should always try to avoid any kind of physical and visual pollution throughout the life span of the product. If it consumes a lot of power if materials used are harmful to the environment — in that case, as a designer, we should try to improve the product comping up with the best design, an innovative one or with an alternate option.

If you look at these two Book-shelves made up of wood. They are good, I mean purpose — wise they are fulfilling their consumer’s needs. but if you look at the second design — It required more material to build to do the same thing as the 1st one doing. No doubt the material used is eco-friendly and it can not be considered as bad though but as a designer, one should try to bring maximum gain out of fewer resources. Because resources are limited and we should be careful with the use of them.

So, here are all points that one should eventually keep in mind before designing anything. These points are worth telling you why some designs fail to meet their goals and why some do it great. well, yes colours and human psychology are there to affect your design but these 10 points majorly affect the vibe of the design.

Hope! you enjoyed reading and next time when you see any design good or bad probably you could point out why it’s bad or good.

Thanks for reading.