What is bad design, and how do you identify it?

Sometimes you will look at something, and think.. bah, that is a really bad design, the experience is totally off. And often you know this instinctively, but what if it is just a matter of your not being the one this was designed for, or you simply being in a bad mood.

Fear not, Hidden by Design is here to help you. We have questions you can ask about the design, and then you can use this as a parmeter for finding out if the design is good or not.

It is not nessecary for all designs to live up to all of these, but if a design fail most of these

1. Predictable (past and future)
   Is the design predictable, can the user predict what is going to happen, and does to user understand why things happened?
2. Consistency (Both in experience and Aestetics)
   Is the experiecen consistendoes it work as you would expect something like this to work, and does it have a consistent look.
3. Instant Feedback
   When using the object, does it tell you want it happening, does it have feedback, and is it given at all time what is happening? When you click a button, you have to be told that the button is clicked.
4. Easy but Deep
   Is it easy to understand how to use the design, and does it offer different ways to combine and solve issues on? This is mostly applicable with games, but to be honest, in my opinion, this should be something that all designs should have.
5. Autonomy
   This is very much about the user being in control. I often ask myself, does the user controls the situation, or does the situation controls the user. In most cases we want the user to be free to control the situation. A good design should enable the user to do thing and set them free.
6. Does it solve my problem
   Often, a design or tool "almost" solves the problem, or is not really doing the thing that it is supposed to do.. its the "You had one job" situations, where the design does not do what you need it to do. You would be surprised how many designs does not live up to this one.
   

Bonus: In this Episode, both Martin and me falls prey to a very famous Bias, which bias is this?

The questions:

UI is not design!

And with that out of the way, lets get to the meat of this episode.

This is an episode about understanding what User Interfaces (UI) is and isnt.

Now that you read this far, then I feel I need to make sure that I mention that design cannot exist without an interface, and so, in that way, they are connected at a very fundamental level. Its like paint in a painting, a painting cannot exist without paint.. but paint is not the painting, it shows the paiting.

This episodes starts with us talking about what users interfaces are, and this in the end, we do a lightning round of the laws of Gestalt.

In this episode you will learn

What UI is and isnt
The difference between GUI and HUD
Cognitive load
Chunking Gestalt

References Season 1 Episode 4 - Constraints and Conventions

Season 1 Episode 12 - Gestalt

This episode is about the relationship between emotions and decisions. We discuss how emotions are the brains way of making decisions, where as an example "hot state" decisions are made at high emotional influence.

Think about your emotions like a cup with a tiny hole in the bottom, everytime something fules that emotion, you put a bit of "emotional water" in the cup, if the water fills into the cup faster than it empties, then at some point, the cup overflows. These hot state feelings anger, love, or happiness, which leads to unreflective actions. So, if its happiness, you will start laughing uncontrolably, and what you will see is all the funny things happening, that will keep filling the happy/funny cup.

Understanding emotions is crucial for designers that wants to create designs that resonate at a deeper level with users.

You will learn:

• The brain is a predictability machine
• Hot State - Cold state
• What is a body budget
• How we make decisions

References:

How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain - Lisa Feldman Barrett