What does good design look like?
By Justin Cheung
0 min read
21 Nov 2024Beautiful designs are nice, but designs that drive results are even better. Discover how we're demonstrating the value of design beyond aesthetics.
Good project management is when timelines and budgets are met. Good technology is when the platform is fast and bug-free. But how do we know when the design itself is good?
In digital product development, teams prioritise project management and technology because they offer clear, objective measures of success: timely delivery, budget adherence, and bug-free releases.
Design rarely receives equal prioritisation because its value is harder to articulate and often viewed as subjective.
To address this challenge, we first need to establish whether design quality can be measured objectively.
Is good design subjective?
Good design is logical. Here’s a task — find the red flower in each of the images below.
This demonstrates that good design can help someone find something and finish a task quicker. We measure this through task success rate — how effectively users can complete specific actions.
The value of good design
To showcase and track the value of good design, the group design team runs value sprints with our priority markets. These two-week-long sprints are short, focused design cycles aimed at ensuring designs are hitting key metric targets, for example, how quickly users can complete tasks or find information.
These sprints ensure designs create measurable impact, and when they don't, we iterate until we meet our targets. This approach allows us to answer the question of design quality with tangible, measurable results, and a more value-driven process.
Better yet, this approach helps non-designers champion user-focused experiences alongside business metrics. By involving everyone in digital product teams in value sprints, we're able to demonstrate that awesome experiences are great for business.
Design principles
Beyond metrics, we've developed another approach to validate good design. We've brought more clarity to our design principles by breaking each down into yes and no questions. The intent is for anyone who reviews designs to go through the checklist during critiques: "Does the design provide clear next steps?" or "Is the primary action obvious?"