Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services

Chapter 21. Detailed Design Principles and Patterns

Although your personas' goals and mental models should still guide your decisions during detailed design, personas aren't the most useful tools for deciding whether to use a list box or radio buttons, how large a click target should be, or whether physical controls should be convex or concave. For this reason, principles and patterns play an increasingly large role in detailed design.

As discussed in Chapter 15, design principles are guidelines that help you choose the best way to organize and portray information and tools so users can take action with minimal time and effort. Patterns are types of solutions that tend to be useful for certain kinds of problems. The principles and patterns discussed in Chapters 15 and 17 still apply, but detailed design requires a larger vocabulary of both. As in those earlier chapters, I won't attempt to describe every useful tidbit, but will cover some highlights and offer additional resources. Experienced designers may wish to skip or skim this chapter; that said, it never hurts to revisit fundamentals.

Principles and patterns are not necessarily unique to one design discipline or another; Lidwell et al. illustrate this nicely in Universal Principles of Design.^[43] This is particularly true of detailed design, where it becomes difficult to separate where one discipline stops and another begins. For ...