The Qualities of Great Design

Hello. Hi, I'm really excited to be here to talk to you today about The Qualities of Great Design. My name is Lauren Strehlow, and I'm a design evangelist here at Apple.

The evangelism team, our number one goal is to help developers just like you create great apps. And a big part of my job is actually to work with the design presenters who are putting on all of the awesome design session content that you see here at the conference.

So when I started to work with potential presenters this year about their talks, this theme of quality kept coming up, but nobody was talking about it head on, so I decided to.

But I went about it a little bit differently.

I decided to talk to great designers from our developer community, such as the creative director at The Game Band.

I also talked to the cofounders of the Layers Conference, which is actually happening right now across the street.

And I talked to the VP of Design at Khan Academy.

I also talked to some of my great colleagues here at Apple who work in a wide variety of design disciplines.

They work in type design, sound design, motion, visual, and interaction design.

These are all real people who I truly admire and respect, and I think they have created great apps and games that have tremendous caliber.

So I conducted a series of interviews. I talked to 13 people, and I asked them a ton of questions to discover what quality means to them, what challenges they face, and what they do to strive for excellence in design.

So before you think any of this is scripted, I actually didn't give anybody these questions in advance.

So everything you're about to hear today is real reactions to these questions.

I collected over 15 hours of interview footage, and I've distilled it down to the very essence of these responses.

So the audio clips you're about to hear today represent what I discovered about quality in great design. So today, we're going to dig into interpretations of quality and how it influences our perceptions and design directions.

We're also going to talk about its effect on people's lives. Actually, this is really exciting because it turned out to be so much more than what I expected.

We're also going to hear about aspirations from the designers that I interviewed, to hear what drives them, what goals they have when they're striving for quality, even if those goals seem unattainable.

And finally, I want to share some techniques that were revealed while asking people about their experiences.

And I hope that these techniques can help you approach the challenge of designing for a lot of people.

So this session is all about the qualities of great design defined by designers.

So let's kick things off, and get started, and hear a few answers to this one simple question: What is quality? Quality is nothing else than what we agree upon is good.

If something is quality, it implies that there is nothing random about it.

The number one thing is just that something with a lot of care and time went into it. It's one of those things that people can feel it when they feel it, and it's very hard for them to put their finger on it. All right. This one I can really relate to. I'm totally a feeler, and so this naturally led me to ask a follow-on question: What does quality feel like? Does it feel like somebody has thought of you already and all the things that you need are easy to get to and very understandable? I think that when I'm thinking about things that are quality or handling things that are quality, it's things that aren't painful to use in any way, which could be, like, mentally painful, physically painful, emotionally painful, things that don't make me feel uncomfortable, or dumb, or or inconvenienced. If you just launch the app and you feel, as you use it, oh, well, this feels like state-of-the-art technology that I'm using. This feels like it's easier for me to get things done. I feel more productive. I feel like I'm able to achieve better results. All the concentration that you're building up goes to the task at hand, the thing that you actually want to do. And that to me feels like quality. If you're able to achieve that, and people can be very creative, and make beautiful things, or have special moments through a device -- for example, by taking really good pictures, or sharing pictures with friends, or finding the right music to play at the right moment, or, you know, doing fun stuff with FaceTime, and seeing people on the other side of the world that you haven't seen in a long time -- all of that is very special. And again, none of that is around the UI that you're doing. None of that is about what interaction you chose to do that stuff. That should all be obvious, and blatantly unspoken, and just completely in the background. Wow. I just love that, that quality isn't about the UI or interactions, that it's about the moment, the people. You know, these are the people that you're designing for, and you're helping them create memories and share those moments with others.

That is what this is all about.

So how do you design for that? Well, I actually asked that question.

It's hard.

Yeah. I hope you weren't actually hoping for a real answer here. It's definitely very hard, and we have 55 minutes to dig into why.

So we just heard a ton of answers to this question, what is quality? We heard that it is what we agree upon is good, that it's not random, it's something that shows a lot of care and time went into it, and it feels like somebody has thought of you already.

It can also be not painful in any way, and it feels state of the art. Quality things make it easier to get things done.

And finally, your concentration goes to the thing that you really want to do, like sharing that picture or playing your favorite song. So by asking about quality, it resulted in many different answers, but what's so great about that is that it reflects what each one of these people truly care about.

And of course, people care about different things, so it makes complete sense that they all have different interpretations of what quality is when it applies to apps and games.

So we have a lot to get to today, but I really want to dig into just a couple of these responses. I think they're all great, but let's just dig into this first one here.

And we're going to listen to the clip one more time. If something is quality, it implies that there is nothing random about it.

During this interview with Nicole, she explained that not random to her meant not slapped together. And she used this word "considered." Great designs are considered. They're organized, and they show