As much as we might wish it weren’t so, we know errors are going to happen on our sites and in our applications. So far in this series of posts we’ve looked at the different types of errors that may occur along with some strategies for guiding users to take correct actions. This week we’ll finish up with a discussion of strategies designed to prevent errors and minimize the effects of errors when they do occur.
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When designing websites and other applications are there ways we can guide users to make correct choices, help them interact with our systems, and generally make our systems more usable? A variety of strategies exist to improve our interface designs and today we’ll talk about 2 of them.
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Errors happen. It’s inevitable that any system will fail at times. Often failures are attributed to human error. Most, though are really due to design errors. As designers what can we do to minimize errors and their effects on our sites and in our applications?
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Redundancy is the use of more elements than necessary to maintain system performance in the event that one or more elements fails. It’s probably not a word you think about much when creating a new design, but it’s an important principle of design and one you use all the time, even if you aren’t thinking about it.
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Last week I was reading an article in How Magazine, titled “An Irreversible Movement,” by David C. Baker. The article was actually two essays, one by Baker and one by Debbie Millman, with each author taking a different side on crowdsourcing and it’s impact on design and designer’s. Baker had a quote within his essay about design being a commodity
Design is or (soon will be) approaching commodity status, but the management of the design process is difficult, misunderstood, and undervalued.
Structures, specifically patterns and textures, are used to differentiate one form from another and a form from it’s surrounding space. They also add interest, depth, and a sense of realism to your design. They can be added to individual forms or to the space around forms and they are created through organized or random structuring of elements.
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Last week we looked at zero and one dimensional elements, namely the point or dot and the line. This week we’ll add a couple of dimensions and talk about surfaces and planes (2D) and then move on to volumes (3D). Throughout we’ll consider the ideas of visual mass and weight.
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When it comes to working with elements in a design we have two basic classes to work with. We have positive forms and negative space. The most basic form we can use is the abstract point or it’s concrete sibling the dot. We can build up points or dots so they become lines which is our second most basic element.
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Last week I walked through some definitions of visual grammar. We talked about objects and structures, both abstract and concrete, as well as activities and relations. These objects and structures make up most of the design elements we have at our disposal.
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