Let's take a virtual tour of the workshop of Dieter Rams, a celebrated industrial designer. By delving into the core of his successful approach, we can integrate essential elements into our designs, perfectly aligning with the modern ethos of "less is more."
For user experience practitioners, familiarity with Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics, Ben Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules, and other user interface principles is commonplace as part of the human-computer interaction knowledge "package." As the UX field expands and permeates various aspects of business, product design becomes increasingly relevant. Therefore, learning from other design disciplines is invaluable.
Dieter Rams, a German industrial designer, significantly influenced Braun's consumer products for many years. About 50 years ago, in his quest to evaluate his designs, he developed the 10 principles of good design, sometimes known as the "10 commandments." These principles remain remarkably valid today, perhaps even more so than when Rams initially formulated them.
The Ten Principles of Good Design
Rams' design philosophy adopts minimalism and simplicity, following the idea that a product’s form should be driven by its purpose, not aesthetics. He firmly believed that good design stems from understanding people and ending wastefulness. His design influences came early in life when he worked as a carpenter at his grandfather's workshop. As an industrial designer at Braun, Dieter Rams followed the philosophy of "less is more." This approach has generated timeless, quality products with an international reputation. The goal of his work was clarity of form, ease of use, and choice of material.
While working at Braun, Rams sought the true meaning of good design, leading him to devise ten principles that continue to inspire designers:
Read also: Good Design According to Dieter Rams
Good design is innovative. Designers should reflect novelty and innovation in their products, as technological advancement offers endless opportunities. Designers should reflect novelty and innovation in their products. Since they have constant access to developing technology, there’s no excuse not to innovate. 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.
Good design makes a product useful. A product must meet psychological and functional standards. This principle asserts that a product should have a specific function. Therefore, designers should eliminate anything that limits functionality, emphasizing the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Some might argue this rule set the precedent of what we know as usability with modern technology and interfaces.
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.
Good design makes a product understandable. A good design should be self-explanatory and use the user's intuition. It should clarify how a product functions and provide basic instructions. However, excessive instructions may be tiresome for the user to follow. In other words, “don’t make me think,” much like Steven Krug’s now famous book preaches to today’s UX designers. It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good design is unobtrusive. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. A vital aspect of a good design is to help a user perform a task, providing clear actions.
Good design is honest. A product shouldn’t make promises it can’t deliver. Rams believed a good design should be reliable and durable for its intended purpose. Designers are responsible for improving user experience and delivering on their promises. Therefore, actions shouldn’t be unambiguous. Instead, they should be honest about what they deliver to the customer. Congruently, some of Jakob Nielsen's ten general principles capture the essence of this principle:
- Visibility of system status
- Match between the system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Error prevention
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Providing ways to recognize, diagnose, and recover from errorsThese all play into keeping the digital design honest to user expectations and communicating that effectively. It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Good design is long-lasting. A good design never loses its relevance, so it never appears antiquated. Therefore, rather than following fashionable trends, a good design should strive to remain timeless. Digital design has a much harder correlation to this specific principle, more often focusing on iterations being a positive aspect to keep up with the rapid pace of technology. It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years - even in today’s throwaway society.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail. In design, every little detail matters. Details such as accuracy, images, and text should impress and assist the user in everything they do. Designers’ attention to detail can make the product useful, honest, and timeless. We say “pixel perfect” in the digital space to ensure every detail serves our user base. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the user.
Good design is environmentally friendly. A good design should contribute to environmental preservation. Dieter Rams strived to design products that contributed toward protecting the environment. That’s a principle we should really embrace today. Technology could significantly affect how we design and iterate while staying environmentally friendly. Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good design is as simple as possible. A good design won’t have irrelevant details. Rams championed clean and straightforward designs, believing that less is more. An analysis of his works reveals the concept of minimalism, where products only have essential features. We can still see minimalistic elements in material design, showing its timelessness. 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.
Read also: Espionage and betrayal: The Dieter Gerhardt case.
Applying Rams' Principles in 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.
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?
Digital design affords a lot of room for expression. Because of this, we have to design with an appropriate structure. MySpace didn’t have that miracle structure. 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. Thus, we should always consider all sides of the coin and choose the option that is best for the user.
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. For example, be mindful of crisp, clear text (which will always be readable) versus playful fonts that seem “cool”. Check out the lettering on the covers of 1970s pulp-fiction books … dated, aren’t they?
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.
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?
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!
The Enduring Impact of Dieter Rams
Although Rams created his principles with physical products in mind, they remain relevant to other design fields. Rams created a new form of timeless design that avoids fashion trends. Some of his original designs are still in production, like the 606 Universal Shelving System from 1960. His timeless designs have beaten obsolescence and trends.
In addition, Rams' design principles have been influential to brands. Apple’s designer Jonathan Ive created iPhones, iPad, and iPhones that mirror Rams’ minimalistic style. Design is often thought of as the art of making something beautiful. But any designer will tell you that good design involves a lot more than just aesthetic design. Whether someone is designing a car, a dress, a poster, or a teapot, the final product is useless unless it fulfills its purpose. Imagine an environmentally-friendly car that’s also safe, fast, and sleek. However, the designer forgot to include doors. Pretty pointless, right?
Rams’ design philosophy continues to influence the future of design. His 10 principles can apply to pretty much anything you can create, from physical objects to digital products.
Rams’ design ethos is so influential, that brands like Apple use his principles as guidelines. In fact, some say that his 1958 Braun T3 Pocket Radio directly inspired the look of the first iPod designed by Jony Ive for Apple in 2001. Plus, the iPhone OS 1 calculator app from 2007 is a clear homage to the Braun ET44 (1978) and ET66 (1987) calculators.
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