At the end of the day a product that does not deliver benefit to the stakeholder is a failure. For a design to be considered good there has to be a net profit from its use. Of course “profit” can mean many things. Are you looking for more sales or subscriptions? Maybe eyeballs on a video or engagement with a news site. You could be looking to sign up people for a petition or conducting a survey. Regardless of your metric the operative term is always more. One is greater than zero and all other numbers are greater than one. This is where a lot of designers fail by losing sight of the business case while designing what they consider very cool UX. Cool does not always equal profitable.
Design to profit
Your company (or group, or charity, or what have you) has a brand message that needs to be communicated to your users. Are you a tough and aggressive winner or a kind and supportive caregiver? Do you sell punk rock t-shirts or shirts with unicorns and butterflies? Are you a financial service where a user feels safe investing their money or an online gambling site for financial thrill-seekers? Each of these brands has a different message to relate about who they are and how they want be perceived and the color palette, typography, layout, density, buttons, objects, and imagery all shape that message. A good UX design takes all these elements into account and delivers a truer narrative than any amount of text can.
Design to message
All creative endeavors serve a function (even surrealism. Feel free to debate me on it). Good design and especially good UX design stems from keeping the function of the product in mind at all stages of development. A product may have multiple functions (in which case I actually think of them as multiple products) but any element that does not directly serve the function needs to be eliminated. It can be as simple as removing a couple of extra clicks in a process or as complex as deprecating an entire widget that serves no purpose. Every time you streamline your users process you make your product better.
Design to function
Since art school I have developed a series of basic design principles which have served me well. Until my dive into UX design I have never done anything so formal as to write them down but have always kept them in mind. As I have developed my design thinking I wanted to put them down here to help clients understand my process.
How I do what I do?
My Design
Principles