What you create should be a natural flow of what your clients needs to do. Don't go and add lot of options like a plane cockpit. Which usually means try to find the common theme and adding on top, and also clamping down on fantasy wishes
"Good design is aesthetic"
I'd take the definition of pleasing instead of beautiful for the term. When learning to draw, an often given advice is just to focus and detail only a single part of the whole picture, everything else can be left out. So discussion over a single thing is usually meaningless. If it's not going to be the focus point of interaction, as long as it meshes into the whole, no one care about the exact details.
“Good design makes a product useful”
Usability is a whole field, and you can find the whole corpus under the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) keyword. Focus on meeting this baseline, then add your creativity on top.
> I mean these principles all sound good and high falutin’ as abstract statements, but I’ve never found them useful or actionable
It's kinda like Philosophy, you have to understand what it means for yourself. It's not a cake recipe to follow, but more of a framework from where to derive you own methodology.
“Good design is as little design as possible”
What you create should be a natural flow of what your clients needs to do. Don't go and add lot of options like a plane cockpit. Which usually means try to find the common theme and adding on top, and also clamping down on fantasy wishes
"Good design is aesthetic"
I'd take the definition of pleasing instead of beautiful for the term. When learning to draw, an often given advice is just to focus and detail only a single part of the whole picture, everything else can be left out. So discussion over a single thing is usually meaningless. If it's not going to be the focus point of interaction, as long as it meshes into the whole, no one care about the exact details.
“Good design makes a product useful”
Usability is a whole field, and you can find the whole corpus under the HCI (Human Computer Interaction) keyword. Focus on meeting this baseline, then add your creativity on top.
> I mean these principles all sound good and high falutin’ as abstract statements, but I’ve never found them useful or actionable
It's kinda like Philosophy, you have to understand what it means for yourself. It's not a cake recipe to follow, but more of a framework from where to derive you own methodology.