If we adopt the aesthetic of designs being invisible, a good design would make the inputs, state, and outputs discoverable, clear, and efficient to use.

Some of these implicit inputs also have default values. For example, when you first used Google, your search history was empty, your language preference was chosen based on your IP address, and so on. Defaults represent a designers’ beliefs of a user’s most likely expectations, intents, and tasks. It’s important to remember that there is no “average user,” and so your choice of defaults will inevitably serve some people better than others. For example, if Google detects that a browser is in the United States, what language should it default too?

prototyping isn’t strictly about learning to make things, but also learning how to decide what prototype to make and what that prototype would teach you. These are judgements that are highly contextual because they depend on the time and resources you have and the tolerance for risk you have in whatever organization you’re in.

This means that every prototype has a single reason for being: to help you make decisions. You don’t make a prototype in the hopes that you’ll turn it into the final implemented solution. You make it to acquire knowledge, and then discard it, using that knowledge to make another better prototype.

cis-normativity, or the assumption that all people have a gender identity that is consistent with the sex they were assigned at birth) that has been built into the scanner, through the combination of user interface (UI) design.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1Jonathan Calzada, scanning technology, binary-gendered body-shape data constructs, and risk detection algorithms, as well as the socialization, training, and experience of the TSA agents.d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1Yingying Han.6

The fundamental idea of a walkthrough is to think as the user would, evaluating every step of a task in an interface for usability problems. One of the more common walkthrough methods is a Cognitive Walkthrough77 Polson, P. G., Lewis, C., Rieman, J., & Wharton, C. (1992). Cognitive walkthroughs: a method for theory-based evaluation of user interfaces. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. . Despite having been published in the early nineties, the technique is quite general, since it focuses on what people are thinking while using an interface rather than the interface.To perform a walkthrough, the steps are quite simple:Select a task to evaluate (probably a frequently performed important task that is central to the user interface’s value). Identify every individual action a user must perform to accomplish the task with the interface.Obtain a prototype of all of the states necessary to perform the task, showing each change. This could be anything from a low-fidelity paper prototype showing each change along a series of actions, or it might be a fully-functioning implementation.Develop or obtain persona of representative users of the system. You’ll use these to help speculate about user knowledge and behavior.

One of the lowest cost methods that works well for low-fidelity prototypes is a task-based evaluation (also called a “user” or “usability” test). In a usability test, you define some common tasks to perform with your user interface and you invite several people who are representative of the people you’re designing for to attempt to use your design. Usability tests can help you learn about lower level problems in a user interface (layout, labeling, flow, etc.), but they generally can’t help you learn about whether the design achieves its larger goals (whether it’s useful, valuable, meaningful, etc.). This is because a usability test doesn’t occur in the context of someone’s actual life, where those larger goals are relevant.

Don’t simply copy the designs you find in your research. The competitors may not be using best practices. Instead, be inspired by the solutions found in your research and adapt the solutions to fit your brand, product, and users

For many years, surveyors approached questionnaire design as an art, but substantial research over the past forty years has demonstrated that there is a lot of science involved in crafting a good survey questionnaire. Here, we discuss the pitfalls and best practices of designing questionnaires.

One critique of all of these approaches, however, is that no design, no matter how universal, will equally serve everyone. This is the premise of design justice44 Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. MIT Press. , which observes that design is fundamentally about power, in that designs may not only serve some people less well, but systematically exclude them in surprising, often unintentional ways. Consider, for example, Black Americans, whose darker skin is often not recognized by hand soap and water dispensers in public spaces. This is not a natural limitation of technology—it is a consequence of designers choosing a sensor technology that must necessarily be calibrated for particular skin tones, and then calibrating it for white skin. Design justice argues, then, that some designs, when they cannot be universal, should simply not be made. And if they can be universal, then they should be made in ways that 1) center power inequalities, 2) center the voices of all directly impacted by the design outcomes, 3) prioritize impact on communities over designers’ intents, 4) view designers as facilitators rather than designers, 5) ensure designs are sustainable and community led, and 6) build upon and amplify the solutions that communities have already found.

first try to analyze the problem you are solving, then generate ideas, then test those ideas with the people who have the problem you are solving. Then, repeat this process of analyzing the problem, designing, and testing (which we call iteration) until you converge upon an understanding of the problem and an effective solution. The premise of this approach is that by modeling a problem, and verifying solutions to it, the design one arrives at will be a better solution than if a designer just uses the pre-existing knowledge in their head.

Another way to generate creative ideas is to steal them from other contexts. Why would you spend a bunch of time generating good ideas when there are so many good ideas already out there? Find those good ideas, combine them into something new, and you’ll have something even better. These good ideas can come from anywhere: look to products on the market, products that are no longer on the market, the solutions that people are already using to solve a problem.

Notice how a good argument actually looks something like a scenario. The difference is in the structure and the intent. The scenarios are structured as narratives and you create them to help you envision and test design ideas. Arguments, in contrast, are inherently about the causality of a problem and you write them to persuade someone that a problem is real and important. They help model the causality of a problem, revealing factors that influence, events that trigger it. They also highlight the consequences of the problem, surfacing what about the situation is undesirable to the people you’re trying to design with or for.

If you’re clever, perhaps you can find a design that’s useful to a large, diverse group. But design will always require you to make a value judgement about who does and who does not deserve your design help.

After some time, I also realized that if design was problem solving, then we all design to some degree. When you rearrange your room to better access your clothes, you’re doing interior design. When you create a sign to remind your roommates about their chores, you’re doing information design. When you make a poster or a sign for a club, you’re doing graphic design. We may not do any of these things particularly well or with great expertise, but each of these is a design enterprise that has the capacity for expertise and skill.