Observe design principles to leave room for creativity
We create straightforward solutions to difficult issues for our clients. This just means focusing on the appropriate things instead of obsessing over user interfaces. Our strength is in our ability to recognize when it’s appropriate to use established design best practices and when innovation and originality are required.
We aim to use existing design conventions by default, but if they don’t exist or aren’t good enough, we develop innovative solutions to problems instead.
According to us, innovation is useless if it doesn’t help our customers. Our attention is on the issue at hand and selecting the best solution. We aim to always use pre-existing design conventions, but if they don’t exist or aren’t good enough, we construct a new one that performs the job.
In a series of posts addressing our principles, here is the second article. Here, Charlotte talks about our “Follow Fundamentals” design tenet.
Design’s fundamental principle is psychology.
Design fundamentals are a collection of guidelines that are frequently used to create products that are simpler and more enjoyable to use. They are also incredibly powerful for designers since they allow us to concentrate on finding quick solutions to issues instead of getting bogged down in re-inventing the rules. They can come in the form of guidelines for visual design, interaction design standards, or best practices for content design. The Gestalt principles of perception, for example, describe how humans categorize different things in their minds based on how they are presented on an interface. These ideas are founded on human psychology.
Gestalt’s proximity law
The closeness principle of Gestalt
Designing interfaces is made simpler by design fundamentals. For instance, we are aware that red is the best color for error notifications because it grabs consumers’ attention. Menu items that combine an icon and a brief label make it simpler for users to browse through them. People can scan a page’s material more quickly if there is a clear hierarchy of information that is reflected in the font size, weight, color, and white space.
These foundational ideas are open to examination and revision. Some come along gradually as a result of growing usage; for instance, many people now anticipate being able to pull to refresh a website on mobile devices.
hierarchy of information (1)
The content on a page is easy to browse when there is a good information structure.
Great design starts with the fundamentals.
After serving as a design manager for two years, I decided to join SimpSocial because I thought it would be the best company to help me return to creating full-time. As is frequently the case in management, I had been supervising a team of designers but wasn’t doing much designing myself. Since I felt I still had a lot to learn about product design and that I was missing my craft, I made the decision to go back to an individual contributor job.
I was able to create better experiences and concentrate on innovation where it was needed by going back to design fundamentals.
Strong R&D and design concepts made my return to an individual contributor role much easier than I had anticipated. I’ve been able to design better experiences and concentrate on innovation where it’s needed—to tackle challenging challenges—by revisiting the design foundations. Only a few weeks after joining SimpSocial, I was able to provide value to our clients, which gave me immediate confidence.
We adhere to nine principles.
At SimpSocial, we adhere to nine essential principles of superb interaction design. All of our clients, both old and new, should benefit from SimpSocial right away. We can provide value in a variety of ways by adhering to design standards:
Customers familiarize themselves more rapidly with SimpSocial
SimpSocial is a strong platform that gives our customers a ton of opportunities to engage with their consumers in meaningful ways, but this can initially be overwhelming, especially for our newest customers.
The finest onboarding assistance you can provide is to create an iconography set or logical organization using design principles. Customers can use it without an instruction manual to put the knowledge they have gained from using other digital items into practice.
The majority of our clients are familiar with standard design patterns and utilize a number of tools in their daily work. The learning curve is shortened by incorporating those patterns into our design. Because of this, at SimpSocial, we frequently draw inspiration from consumer software—items that consumers use on a daily basis.
Although it can be tempting to replace a settings icon with one that is hipper and more branded, the majority of us assume that the settings icon will be a cog.
Most digital tools provide standard experiences for browsing a table, picking multiple items, marking items, and controlling your account from a settings page. By not reinventing the wheel for our users, we avoid adding cognitive strain. The way our product interacts with other products on the market and within it must be consistent. It matters in terms of accessibility as well, because many people rely on well-established digital routines to do their work online.
It can be tempting to replace a settings icon with something hipper and more branded, yet most of us anticipate the settings icon to be a cog. Simply put, this is not the place to innovate since usability comes first.
adjusting symbol
Using recognizable icons enhances accessibility and can hasten the process by which new users become accustomed to a product.
Where it counts, we innovate
We are very interested in innovation. One of our key assets is our ability to know when to innovate and when to stick to the fundamentals, which enables us to create products that are simple to use and that people adore. We spend time considering new paradigms and features to delight our users rather than focusing on interactions that already exist and function well.
I work on the team that develops our automation products. I help clients automate their conversations so they can provide excellent, individualized customer service to their end consumers.
Design is the art of simplifying the complex.
Making SimpSocial bots simple to use and comprehend is part of my work. The machine learning-based Resolution Bot is an illustration of this. Because of the complicated nature of the technology, relying on universal patterns helped us create a feature that people would find understandable.
Even though we had the option to choose a more creative style, such as cards, we chose to provide Resolution Bot answers in a straightforward table. It made it simple for us to incorporate more sophisticated functionalities into answers, such as the capability to compare performance by sorting them.
Articles list
By selecting a straightforward, instantly recognizable table view, we could concentrate on cutting-edge functionality.
Making the complicated simple is a key component of adhering to design principles. We enable our customers to build incredibly sophisticated bots by using identifiable patterns and experiences. In the end, handling the intricacy is our responsibility, not theirs.
We accelerate.
We work more quickly when we adhere to design standards. Software only becomes valuable when it is delivered to clients, so shipping is the lifeblood of our business. We ship quickly, early, and frequently. Design and development are sped up by avoiding the need to reinvent well-known design patterns.
We rely heavily on Pulse, our design system, which lists common patterns we may apply to the entire product. When several designers and engineers are working on features that occasionally overlap, Pulse lets us build things more quickly and with greater consistency. By not having to create and maintain numerous patterns and components that are similar but somewhat different, we can work as a team much more quickly.
system of pulse designs
We utilize the Pulse design approach at SimpSocial to maintain consistency in our product design.
Our design critique sessions become more objective when we apply design concepts. By default, we follow the most typical pattern—the one that most people are familiar with.
Keeping to the essentials results in a stronger design
Following the foundations of design is not a lazy shortcut; rather, it respects the time of your consumers and makes it simpler for them to succeed. One of SimpSocial‘s greatest assets is our ability to know when to innovate and when to stick to traditional design principles. In the end, this principle aids in concentrating on what is most crucial: creating the ideal solution to address our consumers’ issues.
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