How do you handle design when working a project that doesn’t have explicit design guidelines?
I’ve been working on some personal projects, but I am continually getting held up on design. I hate looking at a blank page, not knowing where to start. I’m not a particularly creative person in art and design and I really struggle to come up with new ideas on my own. I don’t enjoy it.
I’m the kind of person who buy 10 plain black t-shirts and 5 pairs of plain jeans so I never have to think about style.
I’m sure there are a lot of us out there; you can make the thing but, not design it. How do you work that part of the process?
I don’t want my projects to get skipped over because they’re ugly and I don’t want to copy other designs pixel for pixel.
- Write down who your customers are.
- Write down what problem your customers have, which can be solved with your product.
- Write down how your product can solves the problem.
- Figure out how you can achieve that goal (this needs to be separate to step 3 - you’re essentially tackling the same thing from a different perspective… helping you see things that might not be visible from the other one).
- Anything that does not bring your product closer to the goal(s), remove it from your product.
- Anything that would bring you closer, but isn’t achievable (not enough resources, going to take too long, etc), remove those as well.
Those are not singular items. You have multiple customers (hopefully thousands). Your customers have multiple problems your product can solve. Actually solving all of those problems will require multiple things.
If that list sounds functional, that’s because good design is functional. Aesthetics matter. Why do you choose a black shirt over an orange shirt with rainbow unicorns? Take the same approach for the colours on your app icon. Why do you choose jeans that are a specific length? Take that same approach for deciding how many pixels should separate two buttons on the screen.
You said you struggle with looking at a blank page. Everyone does. If you follow the steps I outlined above, then you won’t be working with a blank page.
A controversial suggestion, but you could read up and maybe take a few courses. While I love UX/interaction design you might want to start with UI design and design patterns. Once you get a basic UI and know when to implement different patterns you can move on and work on the UX.
I would suggest the same here, some learning is needed. There’s a reason you hire UX designers and not just more programmers.
As a user myself, I just design it the way I think is best if I was using it because 9 times out of 10, I’m making it for myself in the first place.
You can start by using plain, semantic HTML and grabbing a classless CSS with a license you like. (Check out this list.)
It’s good enough for a simple app or site, and it’s honestly impressive how good something can look with just this. It’s the “plain t-shirt and jeans” of web design.
We just point a backend developer at it and hope.
