Essential Design Principles

Hello everybody. My name is Mike Stern. I manage the Design Evangelism Team at Apple, and it is my honor to be with you today to talk about design.

Now, at Apple, we often use the term human interface to describe what might otherwise be called user interface. Human interface is an uncommon, not widely used term, but it has a really long history at Apple. Our design documentation, this is the newly redesigned macOS HIG, it is called the Human Interface Guidelines.

This document goes all the way back to 1978, a full 15 years before I was even born. I'm just kidding. I'm old .

The word user can have a clinical or anonymizing effect.

It narrowly defines people in relation to the interface.

Human evokes a much more nuance picture of who it is that we are designing for. If I say I'm only human, it is to acknowledge that I have imperfections, and I have shortcomings. I might fall short of your expectations of me. Hopefully not right now.

But the word human is also how we express our highest and most noble qualities. When you acknowledge someone's humanity, you're recognizing their kindness, their compassion, their generosity and goodness. Designing an interface is fundamentally about serving other human beings.

The goal isn't to make a beautiful app, or a well-organized app, or a simple app or a focused app.

Those things are all really important, but they're not the real goal.

The real goal is about serving the human beings or positively affecting the lives of the people who use the apps that you make.

The only thing that really matters is how well your app satisfies the emotional and practical needs of the people you are designing for.

We have the need for safety and predictability.

We have a need for knowledge, for meaning, and understanding.

We have a need to accomplish tasks, to achieve our personal and professional goals.

And we have the need to experience beauty and joy.

Well-designed apps should provide these things.

Well-designed apps make it easy for people to predict the consequences that their actions will have.

They feel stable, solid, trustworthy.

They help people to make informed choices by providing information that is clear and helpful.

They have streamlined and simplified workflows, so that people can effectively and efficiently accomplish their tasks. And they should have an aesthetically pleasing, enjoyable, and even delightful experience.

Using apps that provides these qualities is so gratifying, so satisfying, you can tell that the people who made the app fully considered your needs.

You sense all the time and all the effort that went into figuring out how to help you get things done quickly and successfully.

Everything is there for a purpose. Everything is understandable.

It just feels so human. When an app makes us feel this way, we sense the humanity of the people who designed it.

So how does the design of your app accomplish this? Now, when we talk about design, we often focus on technique and process. And while these are important considerations, they don't lead to great designs. At least not on their own.

Great designs are guided by a deeper understanding about what design is, at a more fundamental, more human level.

This is what design principles offer us. They express core truths about how we perceive the world around us. How we process information, how we make decisions, and how we communicate.

These truths are universal and timeless.

They apply to all kinds of graphic design. Graphic design architecture, interior design, retail design, landscape design, landscape design, automotive design, I think I said landscape twice, and every other type of design.

Design principles don't tell us how to do specific things in our design, they tell us why we should do those things.

They serve as the foundation upon which great designs are built.

This session is about sharing those principles with you.

Now, some of the things I'll share today might seem kind of basic or obvious.

But the most profound things are often the simplest.

I've been designing for over 20 years. I've been fortunate enough to have worked with many brilliant designers, both at Apple and in the developer community. I've had in-depth discussions about a wide range of interaction design challenges across a full spectrum of apps and games with people from across the globe.

And in all of those experiences, I'm constantly reminded, I constantly return to just how clarifying it is to evaluate a design against the core principles that we are about to explore.

Okay. So, because design principles are universal, I thought it would be fun for us to explore how these design principles shape our experiences in the real world.

Now, there really is no better way to explore the real world than to travel. So, with that in mind, I thought we would all go on a little trip together.

Now, it took quite a bit of persuading, but we managed to allocate a portion of the evangelism team's travel budget to buy each one of you here today a ticket to Hawaii.

What? Right? That's pretty awesome.

Sandy beaches, rainforests, tropical drinks. Sounds pretty great, right? Okay who is down? Who wants to go on this trip? Yeah? All right. Let's go. Now, our journey to lovely Hawaii is going to begin somewhere slightly less lovely, at the airport.

As we approach the airport, we are going to see all sorts of signs.

At first, we see signs about how to get to our terminal.

Then we see signs that provide