Make all visual distinctions as subtle as possible, but still clear and effective. (Edward Tufte)

 In my experience, unfortunately, I’ve seen designers mostly follow the first part of this, and not the second. Which does makes sense. I mean, what do you think is going to be taught in design school? 

In fact, I’d say it may be the thing that probably distinguishes designers most from non-designers. For the latter, art and design meant basically completing filling the page with many figures and colors, then bringing it home for mom to put on the refrigerator. For designers, though, I believe there comes – at some point – an appreciation of the whole, of white space, of not trying to just fill the hole, of letting things speak for themselves, of having a little go a long way, of taking things away rather than just keep adding them in.

I often wonder, though, how well that really translates from design school to industry. Now, if you happen to get lucky and go work for some place like OXO, or an agency, or some cool boutique shop in Manhattan or LA, you’re probably golden. But what if you end up at a bank, or an insurance company, or retail, or telecom, or government, or the military? 

My guess, in that situation, is that your definition of what’s clear and effective might be different than your company and the people you have to work with, at least at first. So, what you see as their adding clutter might actually not be that bad – and might help the user actually understand what it is they’re looking at (you know, affordances).

Take, for example, how drop-downs are signaled. The classic design is a box with an upside-down, filled-in black triangle, at the end of a boxed-in field. So, how can we make that more subtle? Is there something we can take away here? I think the box’s a pretty good candidate. And you probably don’t need to have that triangle filled in. Could you make it just a simple v though? How light can you make the lines? And how large does whatever it’s going to be have to be anyway?

There are plenty of other examples out there. I could go on and on.

Probably the worst I’ve seen, though, is being so subtle that there’s no actual design element whatsoever! Believe me, I see it everywhere these days – menus, scroll bars, table column controls, and other elements that don’t appear until you put your cursor over them. 

I think even Tufte would have to draw the line there.

Designers are not users. Users are not designers. (Jakob Nielsen)

I’d be curious to know when this one came out. I think I remember a previous incarnation that said the same thing, but about developers.

And all that’s telling me three things. First, I’ve been in this business for way too long.

Second, designers are definitely the ones in charge these days. Now, they are a lot better than developers when it comes to UI, or UX, or just plain “getting” users. Designers do, though, need to realize that they’re not perfect, and there’s still a lot to learn.

Third, it seems like whoever’s in the driver’s seat is going to have some serious trouble with perspective. It is so easy to design for yourself, or to assume certain things about your users, or to just get lost in the details of the project itself and forget about the real, actual users themselves.

Luckily, the solution is the same as it was 30 years ago (yup, that’s how long I’ve been doing this). First, I would recommend a little humility. Yes, it’s great to be in the driver’s seat, but you still do have to watch for those bumps and potholes and other drivers.

Second, I would recommend being fully user-driven. There are two basic ways of ensuring that happens – one before design happens, and one during design. 

For the former, there simply needs to be some research into who you are designing for – what makes them tick, what do they want, what do they need, how do they operate – who are they? Now, you can do this in one of two ways, quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative is the more popular, and involves surveys, VOC, web analytics, and so forth. It gives you the numbers, but the data tends to be a little on the thin side (i.e., it doesn't give you the whole picture). That, however, can be supplemented by qualitative – interviews, ethnography, focus groups – all resulting in something genuinely useful in the design process, like a persona. Qualitative gives you smaller numbers, but much richer data. In the end, qualitative can have as much impact - if not more - than than quantitative.

For the latter, nothing beats good old-fashioned user feedback. These days, that simply means getting it out there in production and then doing A/B testing, monitoring analytics and VOC, fielding surveys, etc. Once again, though, your data may be a little thin. Plus, you can’t get any feedback until the thing’s actually live.

You can use usability testing, though, to get feedback at any point in the design process – pieces of paper, an Invision prototype, HTML, a test system. Further, the feedback will be very rich. The users will tell you which direction to head, what’s working, what’s not, what needs to be explored further, what needs to be tweaked, what needs to be totally redone. And, most importantly, you’ll get the why’s behind it all. And that means you can feel pretty assured that you may have actually solved the problem and made the user experience better.

No matter who’s in charge when it comes to UX, if you want to stay in charge, never get too far away from real, actual users.