<aside> 💡 Adapted from a lecture for Design in the Real World™, a 2-semester portfolio class for seniors studying Interaction Design at School of Visual Arts (SVA).

Questions? Corrections? Other feedback? We'd love to hear it.

</aside>

This is a quick summary of guiding principles we find ourselves using again and again. We'll keep referring back to these ✨ magic rules ✨ in critique. Without context, the details here might seem a bit random or vague — "Just do it right!" Hopefully, as we repeat these in our feedback to you, the meaning will become clearer. Always feel free to ask us questions for clarification!

<aside> 💥 Design for consequences, not for artifacts.

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What:

• Think about what behavior you want to encourage in people, and design to make those behaviors easiest.

Why:

• The artifact (e.g. your portfolio project) is not the end goal of your work. Artifacts are simply a tool for you to communicate your ideas.
• Sometimes, the consequences you want to design for won't even have a corresponding artifact. e.g., "To make sure people don't get too distracted, this app will only send notifications once a day"
  • Seemingly-small decisions that are built into product mechanics can dramatically reshape the world 10 years later

How:

• Start a design process by asking "what behavior do we want to promote?" instead of "what screen do we want to design?"
• Always ask yourself: "How might this feature I'm working on be abused? Should this feature or product or advertisement even exist?"
  • If a social product / any product where you can interact with another person: "How might an angry ex use this to hurt someone?"
• Technology can break easily, in ways you might never expect. Ask yourself, "If this product or feature stops working, what are the consequences? What's the backup plan?" The failure mode is also part of the experience.
• You don't need to innovate on every detail and make each artifact super unique. People don't use software in a vacuum, so they'll remember an interaction from one app and probably try to do it in another app. Keep the unimportant things familiar; you can usually only introduce one big new concept/interaction pattern at a time.
• You don't need to put everything on the screen — don't fall into that trap! Remember that people can scroll, or tap through to different views, or be shown the right information at the right time. e.g. via notifications

<aside> 🤔 Always ask why.

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What:

• Always try to discover the root cause for any phenomena in your projects.