Design Is Communication

Posted by: Josh Walsh in Design.

Great applications carefully orchestrate the building of complex data situations, architecting models to interact with data, and lastly designing an attractively useful web interface. While well engineered source code is absolutely essential to these applications ultimately the user interface – the layout and look & feel – is where your clients spend their time. It’s where they learn what an application has to offer, and how it is to be used.

Thus, the interface is the means of communication between the user and their data. As designers, the better we are at communicating, the better our applications will be at communicating messages, intentions and interactions.

Web applications are complicated animals. They store massive amounts of structured information and enable the customer to interact with their data in a manner unique to their situation. As a result, interfaces naturally become complex and over-communicate. Great designers analyze these processes and find the simplest single route possible to achieve their goal.

In essence, great designers build simple interfaces which let humans find their own way to solve their problems.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve Jobs, 2003