Good Design or Fit Design?
I often encounter design challenges when balancing my design ideals with the constraints of reality. Early in my career, I was keen to work on future-driven design projects, probably because they were oriented towards future scenarios. Such a project can maximally neglect the actual external conditions, leaving more room to explore the ideal design.
But this is out of time. In most cases, design, in reality, means “achieving goals within all kinds of actual limitations”, and there is a gap between the actual goal and the goal of ideal good design.
So, should designers give up pursuing the ideal of “good design”?
Good Design
Let’s talk about what a good design is.
The uniqueness of design is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer, so there are no absolute “good” and “bad” design criteria. The good standards in the minds of designers are mostly inspired by some influential design principles developed by the industry and the classic design works brought by design masters.
For example, product design has Dieter Ram’s good design principles, and the digital design field has developed the best user experience design standard. John Maeda proposed The simplicity design laws. The most influential cognitive psychology design expert, Don Norman, also put forward the design principle for good user experience design. So, in most designers' eyes, good design may be the vague ideal that combines the highest design principles formed in the field and the designer’s design philosophy.
What would happen if we were obsessed with the ideal “good” design, like the elegance, simplicity, and smooth experience pursued by Steve Jobs? There is a high probability that the collision with reality will blow away the designer because this ideal good design in the designer’s mind may not be the goal of the product development at all in real. As designers, in the most realistic case, we cannot set our goals too idealistic and expect to create an iconic design like the “iconic egg chair,” but we need to set goals more practical to create a design like “IKEA SNILLE visitor chair” for a fitted design. There is nothing wrong with having the highest design ideal; the problem is ignoring realistic constraints, especially business goals.
Fit design
The avant-garde fashion masters design fashion assumes it has perfectly proportioned models, less consideration of manufacturing costs and commercial profits, etc. Under the influence of fewer limitation factors, designers can maximize the exploration of “ideal” fashion, and such designs are indeed “Good and perfect.” However, it cannot be a fit design for an actual individual.
In most cases, corporate designers need to explore the design based on realistic factors. It means designers couldn’t just consider the inherent principles of good design. They also need to evaluate a set of external conditions, like the business goal, product development priority, implementability of the technology, project schedule, etc. Therefore, a mentality that designers have to adjust to change from making an ideal “good” design to exploring a fit design in reality.
The best-fit design is one in which the designer knows where to compromise to ensure that the most critical problems are solved well and also balances other influence factors. Case in point, designers are inclined to ensure that their designs reflect aesthetic quality, such as the product needs to be elegant and simple enough. However, in many areas of commercial design, aesthetic quality is often a secondary goal of the product. At this time, you must consider which key design standards should be maintained and which should be appropriately discarded. For example, using safety in a medical product has more weight in the design. A designer must adhere to fundamental design standards in these factors while compromising other secondary factors.
When talking about fit design, some people may mistakenly understand it as another extreme situation. In the multi-round design discussion with product managers and technical developers, designers give up design principles and good design quality but cater to the requirements of product managers and technological development. It is not the right way to explore a fit design.
Exploring fit design is not a concession to limitations. Instead, based on evaluating actual constraints, we adhere to the high-priority design goals and explore optimal solutions for high-weight factors while abandoning secondary goals. When exploring the design of fit, we have not given up pursuing “good” design but are better at balancing constraints, knowing how to choose and abandon, and focusing on crucial design factors. Don’t get sucked up in concessions when the designer has an actionable design goal and related design. You need to communicate and maintain it and work it out effectively.
Cases of fit design
There is an ancient wooden arch bridge with a history of hundreds of years in the Fujian and Zhejiang regions of China, which is a model of fit design. There are many rivers in that area, a lack of stone materials, and limited economic conditions, so crafter can only use wood and create a unique and highly applicable design according to local conditions. The designers have exerted the characteristics of the woods to the limit. These wooden arch bridges have good compression performance. As long as both arch ends are fixed, they can withstand the downward pressure by their strength, friction, diameter, angle, horizontal distance, etc. Take the wooden arch bridge in “Along the River During Qingming Festival” as an example, it can bear 2–3 tons of pressure. Some wooden arch bridges have been preserved for three or four hundred years.
Recently, I participated in a medical design project involving a product that has been evolving in the market for nearly ten years. Its life cycle is in the middle-late stages, the design space is small, and many practical limitations exist. For instance, the overall product information structure and user flow are relatively fixed after evolution. Also, the development cycle is concise and does not allow the adjustment of extensive information structure and operation flow from the technique level. We decided on the design direction based on user research and evaluation of all limitation factors, focusing on the experience optimization of core features aligning with the highest business priority. The most important design goals are the consistency of the front-end experience and the reduction of usage-related errors. For example, its front-end interface has many inconsistent UI components due to the dispersion and changes of the development team. These non-standard UI patterns cause a lot of confusion for users, but they also bring trouble to sustainable coding development and affect development efficiency. Even so, the product team developed and evolved these components; we cannot simply abandon them. Designers need to constrain their urge to create new UI patterns, focus on optimizing the existing parts, and make consistent specifications.
In this process, we improve the experience of the product to make it fitter for the actual context rather than blindly pursuing perfect design.
To sum up
- Good design: It is an ideal design that expects various design standards to be met to the maximum extent.
- Fit design: Identify all kinds of influence factors in reality nicely, including trade-offs and injecting “good” quality into the most critical factors.
- Good design and fit design do not conflict. Designers need to develop their taste in what’s “good” design. The high standard of good design is a guiding light and vision for designers.
- Designers need to avoid an idealized mentality to neglect realistic limitations in design and mindlessly pursue “good” design.
- When you want to do an idealized design, you envision the perfect experience scenario. On the other hand, when you do the fit design, you focus on solving the worst experience in real.
- Foremost, the designer must explore fit design rather than an idealized “good.” A fit design results from trade-offs between realistic constraints and injecting “good” quality into the most critical design goal.
Rui Yang is a product designer and design-innovation leader in the Bay Area. You can find Rui on Linkedin.
