Nobody likes to be pigeon-holed. Yet as a designer, I often come across the assumption that because my daily business revolves around a specific medium, my design expertise is limited only to that. For example, by day my main focus is designing engaging user experiences for the web, but I don't consider myself to be a web designer. In my mind, design is far, far broader than that.
I recently had the opportunity to design an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide) interface for a television set-top box. To me this was an interesting departure from my day-to-day work in e-commerce, social media and application design - a chance to look at the world from a different perspective.
When the design was complete, the technical director of the project seemed genuinely surprised that I had understood and adapted to the peculiarities of the EPG, and had designed a user interface that was both intuitive and technically performant. Not bad for a web designer.
He'd worked with many web designers in the past who had attempted to translate their user-interface design principals to the television screen, and had failed miserably - delivering a web experience that was neither practical nor technically feasible on a television.
The world wide web is just one medium that I work in, and I am particularly good at it. But design, for me, is universal. It is about finding a balance between something over which you have no control, and something over which you have no limitation.
On one side you have the immovable truth - i.e. the problem, the business imperative, the limitations of the client device etc. On the other, you have limitless possibility - i.e. the blank canvas. How you choose to fill this second space in order to avoid, solve or fulfill the immovable truth, is design.
This might be sounding a little pedantic; maybe even a bit pretentious, so let me give you an example.
Televisions and EPGs have some immovable truths:
- They are generally navigated with a remote control, using basic directional arrows
- They don't have a cursor or any other discrete on-screen indicator
- There are 'safe areas' to observe, in order to avoid having your interface cropped
- Televisions don't handle certain colours particularly well
- The pixels on a television are physically larger and further apart than those of a computer monitor
- At some point, anamorphic high-definition video will almost certainly be squeezed into a standard definition screen, losing resolution
Some might see these as obstacles, but I prefer to see them as immovable truths - neither negative or positive. It's just the way things are, and I must design an intuitive and engaging user interface within them.
I avoided problematic colours in situations where they might bleed. I used fonts and type-sizes that would shrink gracefully and still be legible when reduced to standard definition.
I created a grid that respected the 'safe areas' and didn't put anything important close to the edges. I included 'on focus' styling so that the user could see which button they were on, without relying on a mouse-cursor to tell them.
In my world, design is about solving problems and answering questions. Good design is about solving problems in new and interesting ways. Great design is about taking those fundamental principals and applying them to any given problem, regardless of the discipline or medium.
