And, to me, that means designing without data. Honestly, why are designers sometimes so enamored of that?
I just had an example crop up at work. One of the designers there was tasked with the simple task of adding contextual help to some tables of financial transactions. While there, though, he couldn’t help but tweak the table a little.
In particular, he added a caret to a table row to show that the row would open up and show more data. Previously, we had signaled that by simply making the description of the transaction a link.
He had a good argument. His thinking was that the link wasn’t enough, and that users wouldn’t get it. Unfortunately, he used himself as data point number one, imagining that he himself might have trouble. It was then an easy hop, skip, and a jump to speaking for all users.
Luckily, I was there to point out that I’ve tested tables like that 100 times, and nobody had any trouble with it. Someone else pointed out that the caret would be non-standard with the rest of the site, where tables that open up are all caret-free.
Honestly, though, it really wasn’t that a big deal. It was just a little extra “chart junk,” as Edward Tufte might call it. It’s certainly not going to break the system.
The only reason I brought it up was that we actually did have some data on that. And I certainly wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to remind designers not to design for themselves.
I’m using it as an example here simply because it was very current and, so, super top of mind. I also think the fact that it had a happy ending made me feel especially good about the whole experience. Believe me, I’ve seen redos that were a lot worse. In fact, it made me feel good that this was so minor, and that it wasn’t a case of just ignoring users outright (which I’ve seen as well).
My guess it was just too darn tempting for my designer in this case. Heck, why not leave the world a better place, right? Turns out the world was just fine as it was. So, no harm, no foul.
Frank is a designer and the author of The Shape of Design
