Making Design Decisions  # 18 Aug 2010

From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

When making design decisions regarding features in your application, it’s important to weigh the costs, not all of which are financial, against the potential benefits. Every time you add a feature to your application, the following things can happen:

  • Your application gets larger.
  • Your application gets slower.
  • Your application’s human interface becomes more complex.
  • You spend time developing new features rather than refining existing features.
  • Your application’s documentation and help become more extensive.
  • You run the risk of introducing changes that could adversely affect existing features.
  • You increase the time required to validate the behavior of your application.

Choosing appropriate features and devoting the needed resources to implement them correctly can save you time and effort later. Choosing poor feature sets or failing to assign appropriate design, engineering, testing, and documentation resources often incurs heavier costs later when critical bugs appear or users can’t figure out how to use your product.

and, the 80 percent solution:

During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider applying the 80 percent solution—that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80 percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to problems.

If you try to design for the 20 percent of your target audience who are power users, your design may not be usable by the other 80 percent of users. Even though that smaller group of power users is likely to have good ideas for features, the majority of your user base may not think in the same way. Involving a broad range of users in your design process can help you find the 80 percent solution.

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