Design principles against feature creep
Continuous improvement leads to powerful, feature rich tools. But at some point all those features can get in the way, for beginners, but also for advanced users. What can we do to solve feature creep? And how do we work this into a vision for Mx11?
Together with my lead designers I dove into this problem. They wanted to make design principles leading, so I helped them to craft a compelling story, and to get their ideas across in an organization that’s heavily focused on adding more features.
Focus on personas
We focused on the needs of beginners and advanced users, and defined key design principles: Beginner users need simplicity, wayfinding, help and undertanding. While advanced users need flexibility, efficiency, and customizability. Putting these very different needs as opposites helped to tell the story.
Opportunities
For each design principles we then turned user problems into opportunities for solutions, brainstormed old and new ideas, and mocked up designs.
Some of the ideas for beginners:
Removing clutter and offer help with forming mental models to bring simplicity. Show code snippets and relevant data to help form mental models. And add 'road signs' to the UI, to make wayfinding easier.
Example ideas for advanced users:
Add accelerators like shortcuts, power -user tasks in right-click menus, and quick configuration options. Offer advanced layouts of the interface. Solve 'entity hell' with entity grouping or hiding associations on selection.
Ideas for beginner users
Ideas for avanced users
A powerful closing
Delivering a vision to a large audience, and hoping that they walk away inspired and with a memory of what they saw requires good messaging skills. To captivate our audience we closed off our presentation with a visionary message: Studio Pro 11, easy to learn, and rewarding to master!
