In an era dominated by "less is more," Dieter Rams' design principles offer a guiding light for creating functional, aesthetic, and sustainable products. By examining his winning approach, we can incorporate vital elements into our designs. Dieter Rams is a German industrial designer who was responsible for the design of Braun’s consumer products for many years. About 50 years ago, in his quest to answer the question “Is my design a good design?”, he developed the 10 principles of good design, sometimes also known as 10 commandments. It’s amazing to see how valid these principles are today, so much that we might feel than even more than back then, when Rams actually wrote them!
The Enduring Relevance of Rams' Principles
Both consumer products and technology have changed tremendously. Even aesthetics have changed considerably and many of Rams’ designs look old-fashioned for most of us, or trendy and “in” if you’re a fan of ’60s and ’70s designs. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself. Despite these shifts, Rams' principles remain remarkably relevant, guiding designers across various disciplines.
The Ten Principles of Good Design
In the 1980’s, Rams set out to create an overview of what defines good design. The beauty of these principles lies partly in the uniqueness of their composition, but also in the fact that they apply just as much to digital design as they do to industrial design. These tenets serve as a touchstone for designers striving to create meaningful and impactful work.
1. Good Design is Innovative
“The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. This means that there is simply no excuse to not innovate. As digital and product designers we have constant access to developing technology. However, the implication that good design must be tied to technological innovation is an extremely narrow understanding of good design. Often we specifically do not want to introduce new ideas or ways of doing something. Good design in this context is often not innovative: it follows tried and tested practices and principles, which we know work.
2. Good Design Makes a Product Useful
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. A product should have a function, and a specific function.
Read also: Good Design by Dieter Rams
3. Good Design is Aesthetic
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful. Let’s not kid ourselves: looks matter. Form should always follow function, but it shouldn’t be forgotten - it should follow. When we talk of aesthetics we open a philosophical can of worms and we must immediately question whether it’s even possible to agree an objective measure or definition of beauty. But even without entering this debate we can see that the purpose of good design is often not concerned with beauty; in the sense that someone perceiving the result of a design would be compelled to appreciate its beauty.
4. Good Design Makes a Product Understandable
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. This is paramount in product design. A good design can speak for itself, without asking the user to commit much effort: showing is better than telling. If a user can intuitively deduce what to do with your design, that’s ace! If you have to compose instructions to get him/her to interact with it, that’s not so ace. In your design, think about this: can you cut down the user’s cognitive load so that the design has already done the thinking for him or her, and all the user has to do is go along with it and interact?
5. Good Design is Unobtrusive
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Don’t design a product around yourself. Further, don’t design your product around a projection of what you expect or even want your user to be. Digital design affords a lot of room for expression. Because of this, we have to design with an appropriate structure.
6. Good Design is Honest
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. The takeaway here is simple. We should be honest with our users about what we’re delivering to them. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good Design is Long-lasting
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Designing for the sake of fashion is a dangerous and generally unhelpful thing. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years - even in today’s throwaway society. We should be especially careful to keep our designs from being put in the “old hat” pile. The first way to avoid this is to ensure that your product/service serves a purpose, as we have seen with the previous principles. Besides, you can also try to: Future-proof our designs by keeping them adaptable. Don’t hem yourself in with assumptions about “new ways forward”. Keep a neutral aesthetic feel to your design.
Read also: Good Design According to Dieter Rams
8. Good Design is Thorough Down to the Last Detail
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. This is where good designers are separated from excellent designers. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user. Every detail must pull its weight on the journey to reaching the best UX. So, think out every detail. Nothing can appear as an afterthought, including that “Forgot password?” screen. Error alerts are another area to watch. When do you customize a design to go the extra mile to reassure the user? During loading, is your page showing a spinning hourglass, a message, a neat animation, or…did you leave it all sterile and white, leaving users wondering?
9. Good Design is Environmentally Friendly
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. In the digital realm, we don’t have quite as much effect upon our physical environment as some other industries might. However, we still should be sensitive to our digital and logical environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product. Watching carbon footprints is relevant to designing. It may sound comical, but the clicks users take and the amount of time they spend on electronic devices add up. If we imagine the Internet as being like the world, we’re on the right track there. Think how you can design with impact and not fill up the Internet with unnecessary pages. That sacred minimalism of “less is more” comes through to another dimension on that note!
10. Good Design is as Little Design as Possible
This sums up a lot of design principles into one. Design should always be intentional, never just filigree. Anything that doesn’t serve the user should be eliminated. Less, but better - because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity. Rams’ signature statement might be: “Less, but better”. Simplicity in web and app design, as with mechanical design, is the ultimate goal in helping users in the digital age. The Internet is saturated with element-heavy designs. This may give us confidence that we can beat out competitors who don’t know what they’re doing wrong, but there’s still the point that many users are wary of the Internet because over-designed sites dominate. Less is more, but “thoughtfully less” means “better”. Making our designs good means making them simple; making great designs means staying focused only on the essentials. Cut off the frills.
Applying Rams' Principles to Web and App Design
Even when designing digital interfaces, we can bring Rams’ commandment on board and make our web designs useful by:
- Making them easy to interact with to the point that the user delights in it. This is user enjoyment through user enablement.
- Our design should always show the user what its function is so that there’s never a gap between what the user perceives the design’s capabilities are and what they truly are.
- Designing with a view to guide our users towards the needed interactions. We must make buttons look like clickable buttons and think about positive and negative interactions. Think of traffic lights: green means go (positive); red means stop (negative).
- Not building unneeded elements into our designs. Remember the 80/20 rule and think carefully before adding every element to avoid the chance of clutter.
- What are you designing for? Is it a bank, where security and padlock insignias and the use of an ever-reassuring blue color scheme are needed? Make your design reflect the character of the purpose of the design and remember that, on the scale between engineering (aestheticless functionality) and art (functionless aesthetics), we’re in a unique position-design.
- Yes, we’re designing for the digital realm, so we have a challenge that mechanical products didn’t. Looking at a hairdryer, you can work out straight away what to do. Looking at a web/app design will take more mental investment. As long as we can make our designs understandable and flow in a way that our users can interact efficiently, there’s a great chance that we’ll save ourselves from generating user frustration. We designers can get trapped sometimes. Digital design is an abstract tableau, and we know that we often have a job to make concepts easier for our users. For example, the advantage point of applying skeuomorphism can lead to a wrong mental model for the user; one that might prevent him/her from error recovery or to become a more advanced users. Thus, we should always consider all sides of the coin and choose the option that is best for the user. The web is a living medium. Updates happen all the time. So, the easier it is to maintain your design, the more likely it will survive on new devices. This means getting back to basics and keeping an eye on the nuts and bolts of design. Yes, we mean brushing up on your HTML to get ready for what the future throws at us all.
Rams' Influence and Legacy
Rams’ design motto, “Weniger, aber besser” which translates to “Less, but better” has not only influenced his own professional works but also the work of some of the most well-recognized designers today, including Apple’s SVP of Design, Jony Ive. “No part appeared to be either hidden or celebrated, just perfectly considered and completely appropriate in the hierarchy of the products details and features. Rams held a firm belief that good design can only come from understanding people. He urged everyone - not just designers - to take responsibility for the state of the world around them.