Over the course of this 4-part guide, we have covered the most important elements of strong visual communication design:
- Perception and the importance of harnessing the process of fixation to create a quality visual communication strategy,
- Appeal and the part aesthetics play in good visual design,
- Learnability and how to design visuals that promote learning and brand recognition.
In this, the last part of our guide, we round things out by creating a framework for the most important visual communication strategies that should run throughout your design process. These strategies are the common thread that bind and guide your visual designs from ideation to delivery.
This framework ties our series up in a neat little visual design blueprint bow, pulling together all strands of the process and underpinning the design mechanics with proven strategies that achieve visual communications excellence every time. So let’s get going!
We are all familiar with the principle of cost/benefit as it applies to financial return on new features and elements, but have you ever thought about applying it to design quality to determine its value from a user perspective?”?
A detailed cost/benefit analysis weighs the cost to the user of interacting with a new or updated design against the benefits associated with its use. If the cost outweighs the benefits, the design is poor and must be reconsidered.
We can apply a cost/benefit analysis to every element of our design. Examples include:
- How much reading is too much to deliver our message?
- How long is too long for a user to wait for our content to load?
- How many steps are too many to complete a necessary step in our process?
- How many questions are too many to ask a user to answer to complete registration?
The answer to all these questions is ‘just enough to make interacting with our content beneficial and enjoyable’.
Remember, the acceptability of certain design elements is a function of the benefits provided by the design. For example, a high-benefit design can compensate for a greater load time caused by this design. The opposite is also true: users will not forgive a long load time for a low-benefit return. Weigh these costs/benefits up carefully and design accordingly.
Another word of caution: Test, test,and test again to ensure you are clear about what your users perceive as costs versus benefits. For example, your users may not even notice a new design element you may see as a major benefit to them. This new design that so excites you in reality may be more of a cost to your users!
Good design requires a good understanding of your users and their motivations. The best route to this understanding is thorough usability testing. Testing your content on a well chosen, representative segment of users can provide information the following:
- How easy is it for your users to navigate, understand, and process your design?
- Do your users perceive the tone and quality of your content as you intended?
- What level of jargon requires explanation and can you alter this content to avoid confusion?
- Are users satisfied with load times?
- What are potential conversion rates?
- Did users notice design changes?
Usability testing requires careful consideration and a well-devised, cognitively appropriate design. The following are some tips to ensure your usability tests provide the data you require:
- Moderated testing is nearly always best. Personalize and facilitate your tests, and include a follow-up. This eliminates confusion and embarrassment on the part of your participants and ensures that tests are not rushed or incomplete.
- Ensure your moderators/researchers are well informed about your content. Give them ample opportunity to speak with your SMEs and content creators so they can evaluate results properly.
- Ensure your moderators are comfortable with silence and able to use any silences to observe users’ reactions to your content.
- Make sure your participants are truly representative of your users. Choose participants that have the same mindset, situation, and user goals as your userbase. Provide them with scenarios that match real-life problems they might need to solve and avoid asking them to ‘pretend’ or place themselves in imagined scenarios.
- Ensure moderators are prepared to modify any test on the fly as the needs and preferences of your participants become obvious to them. The more pertinent the test, the more natural their responses to it and the more accurate the results will be. Never force an unrealistic task; don’t be afraid to adjust or outright abandon a task if it becomes clear that it is not appropriate for your user.
- Use open-ended tasks to discover:
- How people explore and research content
- Any questions users have about your content
- User expectations around how information is communicated within your design
- Whether your content and design meets their needs
To achieve success, a design must meet users’ basic needs before it addresses any higher level needs. Good design follows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs principles; bad design tries to address all levels of need at once without laying down the proper groundwork. Let’s take a look at these principles in detail:
Functionality: Meets the most basic user need; e.g. the website provides the information it claims to provide. If this most basic function is not in place, any higher function design is wasted.
Reliability: Establishes trust and consistency; e.g. the content loads quickly and completely.
Usability: Makes it easy and straightforward to negotiate the content and to add any necessary inputs, with a high degree of forgiveness of any user mistakes.
Proficiency: Empowers people to do something better or to do something they couldn’t do previously. If your design enables users to complete a desired task, easily and completely then your design will be perceived as high level.
Creativity: This is the level where all other needs have been satisfied. Your users can now interact with your design in innovative ways. Designs at this level are perceived to be of the highest value and can achieve cult-like status. Remember, however, that you cannot hope to achieve this level of success if your design does not begin at the bottom of our hierarchy of needs and addresses all other levels first.
When we are tasked with designing any new content or improving upon existing content in any meaningful manner, we need to turn to a systematic process that tackles everyday design challenges in a way that produces high-quality results. Patterns and standards are all very well but merely sitting around, revisiting past designs does not necessarily result in any lightbulb moments. This is where ideation comes in. Ideation enables us to generate a pool of broad-reaching ideas without forcing us into judgements as to the quality of any of them, at least initially. For ideation to be successful, we must remember the following guidance:
Evaluation stifles creativity: Make no judgments. At this early stage, throw nothing out, eliminate nothing.
Record everything: Leave no detail unrecorded. Genius may lie in the details, between the lines, in throwaway remarks or suggestions.
Big is beautiful: Involve as many people as possible.The more people with diverse backgrounds and skills, the better the chance of hitting design gold. It is true that big groups can become difficult to manage, but the richer the ideation pool, the richer the rewards.
Know your users: Ensure that your team, especially when it is a large group, knows your end users and is familiar with their needs and the problem you wish to solve. Taking time to understand these elements at the outset time at the far end of this process while ensuring that ideas are focussed and informed.
Use parallel design: Explore multiple designs. Ideation through investigation of multiple solutions increases the opportunities for discovering the optimal design path. Remember, the chances of hitting design pay dirt from one idea is extremely low, the more ideas the greater the chance of design success. Try to avoid satisficing. Don’t just settle on the first good idea, even if this idea comes from senior management.
Take a break: Once your team has ideated all their potentially genius ideas, it’s time to rest. Giving birth to genius designs is hard work. You want to ensure that the evaluation of these ideas and choice of the overall design is done by a team with their game face on, at peak performance. But don’t rest too long, you don’t want your team to lose momentum or focus. Strike while the ideation iron is still hot!
The most useful designs are not necessarily the designs that users love most. The designs that help users to perform and the designs they want to use to perform their tasks are not always the same thing. It is always dangerous to acquiesce to the latter at the expense of the former. If users choose a design that is less than optimal in performance over a high performing design, then your efforts were wasted. 
Conversely, if a nice design does not perform at the level expected of your users, it is not worth bothering with. Take for example, the Dvorak keyboard, which improves typing efficiency by approximately 30%. Despite its performance advantage, it has never achieved the adoption rates of the Qwerty keyboard. The familiarity of the Qwerty design means that the Dvorak keyboard is renowned more for its novelty than its value.
We need to understand what drives our users to make decisions. We need to better understand the balance between performance and preference.While testing is the obvious choice here, users are notoriously unreliable in discriminating between features they truly like and features that make the performance of their task easier. Observing users interacting with the closest possible approximation of a proposed design is the best determinant of performance.. First rule of Design Club: Don’t listen to users!
Knowing the significance we place on quality here at Docforce, it won’t come as any surprise to know we fervently believe that all design outputs are dependent upon high quality design inputs.
There are two principal causes of garbage in situations:
- Problems of type: feeding the wrong type of input into a system or design. An example might be a UI that allows users to input text into a credit card numbers field.
Problems of type are among the most serious issues to plague a UI as they can produce vastly different and damaging results than those expected. However, problems of type are also the simplest to detect, rectify, and avoid. With appropriate UI affordances, as we discussed in part 1 of this series, Perception, and the correct constraints, these problems should never happen.
- Problems of quality: entering erroneous information. For example, a user may input the wrong phone number by mistake.These errors are commonplace; humans make mistakes like this all the time. Errors like this can mean the system does not recognize search terms or sends information to the wrong address. Frustrating, yes, but largely avoidable when we use previews, confirmations and auto-suggestions.
Creativity without strategy is like a lear jet with no fuel – looks classy but will never leave the ground. The takeaway from this last part of our series on visual design is that we can minimize and often completely avoid the design landfill if we take the time to strategize our designs, to research, to test, retest, and redesign until we have something that works well, something that will save us and our users future heartache and potential brand damage.
For our visual designs to be useful and therefore more likely to be reused and recommended, we cannot fail to address both high utility and high usability. Without these elements working in tandem, our designs will fail!
Through this series, we have striven to show you the importance of looking beyond surface-level design to create and appreciate true UX quality.
In Part 1, we looked at Perception and how to ensure that the physical characteristics of our designs underpin its overall function and enhance its appeal.
In Part 2, we addressed Learnability and the correlation between it and usability and efficiency. We learned how to optimize our designs to make it easier for our users to accomplish their aims quickly and with minimum repetition by eliminating complexity, convolution and gratuitous novelty.
In Part 3 we put the concept of Appeal under the microscope. By examining the principle of Aesthetic Usability, we gained an understanding of how to develop design environments that are visually dynamic while fostering the kind of creative thinking that produces quality visual content.
In this, our last part of the series, we endeavored to help you create a systematic, reusable design framework with which you can create visually appealing and contextually engaging content, every time. Our hope is to inspire you to take the time to devise a flexible but robust design mechanic that will guide you through all your future design endeavors.
We hope you have enjoyed this series as much as we have enjoyed making it for you and that it serves as a resource to steer you towards visual design success well into the future. Stay in touch with us here at Docforce and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin for more helpful communications content.