We have been discussing continuously about design, its uses and applications, what are the different types and their features and scope through our various blog posts. Today what we are going to see is about the 6 factors that influence design.
Actually as discussed in a few posts ago design is about creating a solution for a problem. So, practically speaking a problem could have multiple solutions. Now when we have multiple solutions to a single problem how can we conclude or choose which is the best solution.
There are some guidelines that help us narrow down the number of options we have to help us decide which solution to implement. These guidelines are only called as 6 factors influencing design.
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Design should provide a solution to a problem, if not at least ease the intensity of the problem
To understand the above said guideline let us think of a scenario. Imagine that it is year 1991 and you have just got a job in Chennai, Tamilnadu whereas you are residing in a small town in South Tamilnadu. What challenges might you face in joining your new job? The first challenge is finding out where your office is located in Chennai. You will have to go to Chennai a few days earlier and need to get in touch with several unknown people to figure out the exact location of your office. By the time you could know your office location you would already become frustrated as you might have to travel to and froth many times around the same location. Now after locating your office you need a place to stay. How will you find it? You will have to navigate through the unfamiliar city to find out an affordable accommodation that too there is no guarantee that you will get one in the same locality as of your office's. Even if you have found one still you have no idea about the quality of the hostel or PG. You might not get a proper cot or bed, bed bugs might give you sleepless nights, bathrooms may not be well maintained and many other problems might raise that we would have not even be prepared for. Luckily if we got one the next important thing we need to survive is food. You are really blessed if your hostel or PG is providing you good food or else you will have to find out a nice restaurant or mess to for your daily food, hopefully they prepare it in a hygienic manner. Last challenge to overcome is your commute, how are you going to travel to your office everyday, you can go by walk if you are lucky enough to find an accommodation closer to your office if not you will have to board a public transport bus daily but how will you know which bus to take? Again a whole lot of research and effort goes into it to find out the right bus and the right bus timings hopefully we are one time in the bus stop every day.
Now lets imagine that you are in year 2024 with a similar scenario that you have got a job in Chennai and you have to join it. You have all the above said challenges but you have also got Google maps. You can find out your office location, find out hostels and PGs closer to your office, check their quality through reviews, even book them through the phone numbers provided online. You can also check the bus route from your place to office and bus timings - all of this just sitting relaxed at your native through Google maps. But still what if the hostel owners have posted old photos of the hostel when it was built and haven't maintained it since then? They could have also got some fake paid reviews on Google through some fraud agencies. So, Google maps has not given us a complete solution to our problems, instead it only acts as a helping hand in reducing our problems.
So this is how a design should be. If the design is not able to provide a complete solution then it should at least reduce the impact of the problem. -
Design should be easy, cheap and feasible
I prefer explaining the above concept with a real life incident that happened a few decades ago. There was a soap manufacturing company on which a repeated complaint was raised by its customers that some of the soap boxes were empty without any soap inside the soap package. The soap manufacturing company did a complete inspection throughout its manufactuting process but still they were unable to locate where or why this problm was occuring. After several rounds of discussion they decided to install a scanner in the conveyer belt where the finished products come out so that they could find the empty soap boxes and remove them and stop those empty soap boxes from going to sales. This solution was working fine for a few months until the scanner started malfunctioning. When the scanner started malfunctioning the soap manufacturers called the scanner company to look into it. The scanner company supervisor went through the scanner and came up with a huge bill that shocked the soap manufacturers. When questioned why such a huge amount just to fix the scanner the supervisor replied that the rays from the scanner have exposed the chemicals of the soap to the spare parts of the entire scanner and all of them needs to be replaced. The soap manufacturers asked will it be a permanent solution if they replaced the spare parts or else this problem will become a recurrence. The supervisor replied if they continued scanning soaps then definitely this will happen again. The soap manufacturers were frustrated and were again banging their head to come up with a solution.
That time a senior employee told that instead of deploying a scanner they could place a pedestal fan near the converyer belt so that if the soap box was empty it will be light, hence the soap box would be blown away by the wind from the pedestal fan and if the soap box had a soap inside it would be heavy and the wind from the pedestal fan will not blow it away. The management decided to implement it and they also succeeded.
Now let us compare both the solutions. Scanner would require a supervisor to be employed to see into the scanner and should manually remove the empty soap boxes but the pedestal fan will automatically blow away the empty soap box which is a much easier approach and requires lesser human resource. Price of a scanner, the electricity it would require to run continuosly and its maintenance cost everything is in lakhs whereas the cost of the pedestal fan itself is a few thousands which is far cheaper than the scanner. Will the empty soap box will be blown away by the wind from the pedestal? Yes! So basically it is feasible. So all the above 3 points mentioned in this section title are satisfied. This is how a solution should be. -
Design should be usable by all types of users
When design is supposed to provide solution for a problem, that solution should be universally applicable to everyone irrespective of their age, gender, race, education, technical skills, job, geographical location, cultural background and even physical challenges.
We all carry debit cards and credit cards, when we look at a debit/credit card we will know if it is a debit card or a credit card by reading what is written on the card. What if a visually impaired person wants to use a credit card or a debit card? How are they going to differentiate between a credit card or a debit card. Creating a braille inscribed card would make its production cost really very high which contradicts the previous factor. So what to do now? The solution is simple, we can make both the credit card and debit card diecut at the bottom right but with a small change, the credit card will have a flat chamfered corner whereas the debit card will have a curved rounded corner. Now the visually impaired users can identify the difference between the credit card and debit card by tounching the bottom right corners of those cards. -
Design should work under all scenarios
There was an engineering graduate whose final year project was a portable coffee vending machine that could be summoned from anywhere within a closed space using mobile apps or fixed buttons. His final year project was a huge success such that one of their final project evaluators took them to an investor and decided to make it into a commercial product and sell it to many office spaces that it will reduce the time taken by the employees spent in coffee breaks and will increase productivity. As they expected everything went well and this portable coffee vending machine was deployed in many offices. Now they tried to expand their customer base and pitched it to the railways that this portable coffee vending machine could be deployed in trains and passengers need not wait for the next station to have a tea or coffee. Department of railways also accepted this idea and started implementing these machines in the trains and now the problem starts which was totally unexpected.
All this while the portable coffee vending machine was used in office spaces which are basically static environments, but now it is being used in trains which is a dynamic environment. Not only the train is moving but also it keeps moving up and down constantly, because of which the tremors from the train movement made the coffee spill outside the coffee cup once it was filled or the coffee cup would even topple over even before it starts filling and all the coffee was wasted. So, this is an example of how a design should not work, it should work under all types of scenarios.
And for people wondering how this problem was addressed, the answer is easy they replaced it with larger cups with heavier bases so there was no toppling over or overflowing issues. So to conclude this is how a design should work under all scenarios and situations. -
Design should not give rise to another problem
Remember there was a period in India where people used to look down upon other people who used cloth bags and jute bags as uncultured or indecent because of which everybody started using polythene covers and plastic bags, as their cost of production and storage were very less compared to cloth bags. But 3 to 4 decades later what happened? Awareness about environment friendly products and how plastic bags were bad for the environment as they would take and eternity to decay, spread among people and they started avoiding polythene covers and plastic bags and they even went back to use cloth bags and even bragged about how much environmental friendly their lifestyle is and how much less carbon footprint they leave back. Even governments are running promotions about how much prideful it is to use cloth bags. If this is how we will revert back in time if the solution that we came up with is going to create worse and irreversible problems than that actually existed then better why come up with such solutions. So, as design is coming up with a solution to a problem, first we need to think about the repercussions of the solution we are going to provide and if this solution is going to backfire on us badly or if it will create another new problem then its better that we don't implement that solution as a design. As a conclusion in the name of design we are not supposed to give our users another headache besides providing a solution. -
Design should always communicate with its users through multiple senses
Why do you think mobile phones have 3 different modes namely general, vibration and silent? Mobile phones will be carried to different locations and different situations, depending upon the place we are we will change the mode. When we are at home or in a crowded public place then we will use general mode so that when somebody calls the mobile phone will ring and we will be able to know that we are getting a call and we will answer it. Imagine we are in an office meeting or hospital or library then we would have changed the mode to vibration so that when we get a call only we know it and not others and others are also not disturbed by our phone ringtone. When we go to sleep we change our mobile phone mode to silent so that other sleeping will not be disturbed by the ringtone. We don't change it to vibration mode also while sleeping because the vibration will resonate with the table surface and the vibration noise will get amplified and again it might disturb other sleep. Moreover when we change it to silent mode the screen will glow with maximum brightness so that even if we are sleeping still that bright light will be feebly visible to us and we will know that we are getting a call. So in the first scenario the phone communicates to us through our hearing ability, in next scenario the mobile phone communicates through our touch sense and in the last scenario the mobile phone communicates through our eyes. This is how a product should communicate to its users through multiple senses.
