Steve Krug’s new book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
Archive for category Usability Post
Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Jan 21
Restraint in Design
Oct 4
There is one attribute of good design that I often see overlooked: restraint. Restraint in design is the quality of holding yourself back and implementing something which solves the problem in the simplest way possible. Oftentimes designers want to show off, imprint their own identity on a piece of work or simply get carried away, producing work that is good but losing simplicity and elegance in the process.
Giving your work an identity certainly doesn’t mean you’re losing restraint — it’s actually a good practice — but it may lead down the road of implementing too many design elements for the sake of design elements — things that don’t really need to be there in order to solve the problem. Instead, apply your identity to the core elements — things that you absolutely cannot take out — and throw away the rest. What you’ll achieve is a product that’s simple, yet bears your own mark upon it.
Let’s take a look at a set of modern mobile phones:
If we look at interfaces in operating systems, we’ll see that there is usually a set of unified interface elements that’s shared not only by the operating system’s own tools, but also by third party programs running on that operating system.
For example, Apple’s OS X had a UI called “Aqua” for quite a few years now that gave the buttons and other interface elements a certain look a feel — a liquid look for the buttons and a more metallic/plastic look for the texture of the windows themselves. They’re now moving towards a more aluminum look that will bring it closer to the look and feel of their hardware products.
Until OS X Leopard, there were actually several ‘branches’ of the UI spread around Aqua. There were the plastic windows, the brushes metal windows and the darker aluminum windows. Buttons looked different in each one of these ’styles’. Leopard, the latest release of OS X, has unified the look across the board.
The interface in OS X looks the same on (almost) every app
