The No Fluff Design MethodOverviewIt is said that the best design is not one where there is nothing to add, but one where there is nothing to take away. In other words, in an ideal design everything serves a purpose and is as simple as possible. The No Fluff Design Method (NFDM) is a general approach that guarantees you will create such a design. How it worksNFDM is a very iterative design method with an extreme emphasis on function over form. The general idea is to start with an overly plain design and add features only if they improve the user experience - it is never acceptable to add a feature only for looks. Other key ideas in NFDM are that solutions should be kept as simple as possible and that the designer should be mindful of the danger of reducing the effect of existing features when adding new ones. Let's examine these ideas in detail by going through the steps of NFDM. Step 1 - The Spartan DesignThe first and most important step in NFDM is to create the most minimalist, drab, spartanic design imaginable. For example, if I were designing a chessboard, I would start with a sheet of printer paper that has an 8x8 grid of white squares and black outlines. If I were designing a doorbell, I might start with just a button (not even a pushable one). If I were designing a room, I might start with 4 walls and no doors or windows. The spartan design should be simple to the point of being laughable - the simpler your spartan design, the more assumptions you will find yourself questioning in the design process and the more ingenious your design can become. In many cases, it will be pretty clear what the Spartan Design will look like. In other cases, you may come up with more than one Spartan Design and work on multiple versions of your initial design. If you are unsure what the Spartan Design should look like, you may even start off with a blank piece of paper. Step 2 to infinity: IterationAs many times as you want, you may add or change features of your product. But you may not do so at will. In NFDM, every change needs to be justified by passing all of the following tests under careful scrutiny:
Example: Designing a Board GameThe No Fluff Design Method sounds pretty abstract as is, so let's look at how NFDM works with a real example. To demonstrate, I will take a simplified version of a project that I did which fits NFDM very well - designing a board game. I have chosen this example because it is simple and accessible and lends itself extremely well to visual demonstration. Keep in mind that NFDM is very flexible and can be used for many, many things other than board games, as long as you follow the same approach demonstrated in the example. The Game BoardLet's design a very simple game board in which players move their game pieces from a start position to an end position by stepping over a few intermediate fields. Step 1: the Spartan DesignIn the very least, we will need a start field, end field, and intermediate fields. We will also need to know where to start and end. The simplest way to make this is as follows:
That's it - unless you can think of compelling ways to make the above design more usable (as opposed to prettier), this will be the final shipped product! Fortunately, you are probably brimming with ideas for how to make this board more usable. I will show you what my thought process was by reconstructing some key points in developing this game board. Step 2: highlighting Start and GoalOne usability issue that immediately jumps out is that the start and goal positions should be more noticeable than the other fields, since they are more important:
There were a few decisions made here. I enlarged the start and goal fields and capitalized their texts to make them more visible. I rotated the goal text to run opposite to the start text - it is a fair assumption that players will look at this board from different angles, so it should be equally legible from the front as well as back. Finally, I chose colors to highlight the start and goal fields. Bright primary colors were an obvious choice (red, green, yellow, light blue). I chose red and green because we intuitively interpret green to mean 'start' and red to mean 'stop', which fits the function of the fields perfectly. I made the colors as bright as possible without being strenuous to look at. Step 3: highlighting the intermediate fieldsThe fields in between the start and goal do not stick out enough -they tend to blend in with both the background and adjacent fields. Let's fix this:
The choice of colors here is subtle and deliberate. First of all, I wanted adjacent fields to be as different from each other as possible to make them easier to distinguish. The simplest way to do this is by using two alternating complementary colors. I had alternate designs and ideas using more than two colors, but remember the NFDM dictates that the simplest solution is the best one. If I had picked a design with 3 alternating colors instead, then one of those colors would not add anything to the board's usability, thus violating the nature of NFDM and good design in general! Red and green would have been the simplest choices, since they do not add additional colors to the board. But the problem is that this would de-emphasize the start and goal pieces, thus taking away from our previous feature (recall that taking away from the effect of an existing feature is explicitly banned in NFDM). Black and white would also have been simple choices as well. But I ultimately chose yellow and purple because they achieve a delicate balance. The purpose of the intermediate fields is to tie together the start and goal pieces, yet still keep the emphasis on the start and goal. Yellow and purple achieve such a balance: yellow matches green just about as well as purple matches red, and if you look at the board as a whole, the important parts are bright and colorful and there is no overall bias towards either red or green. Step 4: backgroundSo far, the background of the board has been white. Is this really the ideal color? Almost, but not quite. The purpose of a background is to stay in the background and draw attention to the foreground instead of to itself. White is a bit too bright, so it can be strenuous to look at for a long time and draws a bit too much attention to itself (as opposed to the board, where your attention should be). After a bit of experimenting, I changed the background to this:
The most important thing is that the background is not too close in color to any of the board colors. I have found that only gray tones and very bright blue tones work for this. I chose blue because gray tones tend to make the black outlines of the board spaces less clear. I also shaded the background to become lighter towards the center. This is not just for looks. Doing this highlights the game board, as if a light were shining onto it, and brings the game board to the foreground. This is an often overlooked point - remember that the primary purpose of any background is to bring the foreground to the front! Step 4 and a half: stuck already?!An interesting thing happens at this point: It becomes very difficult to add new features. I did have more ideas for how to improve the usability of this board, but I had reservations about each of them. I drew arrows in various different ways to indicate that you are supposed to move from left to right one space at a time, but each time I found that they draw too much attention away from the board spaces. I arranged the intermediate board spaces in a stair-like pattern to make it look like an uphill climb towards the goal, but was not sure if this was appropriate or whether the benefit was worth the added complexity. So, now what? The above design certainly is not ready to hit the shelves of Toys R Us, but it is getting nearly impossible to add anything to it! This raises a very important point in design - gathering requirements. So far, we have made a generic board. We have no idea from looking at the above design what kind of game this is. What is the name of the game? Is it primarily for adults or kids? For men or for women? Is it a fast action game or a slow strategic game? Is it for 2 players or for 20? Is it a race between people or between racecars? What is my motivation for getting to the end? We do not yet know anything about the theme and target audience of the game we are designing. If we use NFDM, we cannot make any assumptions about these, so we are stuck with a drab and generic design until we find out more about what kind of game we are developing. Knowing the answers to the above questions would certainly give us a lot more ideas for how to improve the design. Step 5: customizing and themingThis is where we change from designing a generic board to designing a board with a specific game in mind. For this iteration, I will give a real-world example. I designed a board game called WordBurst. WordBurst is a word game for 2-20 players that is best played in large groups at parties. The action is frenzied and chaotic, almost explosive, hence the name of the game. So, let's customize our board so that we have a board for not just any game, but for an explosively fast and chaotic party game called WordBurst:
I chose the Jokerman font because it matches the festive party nature of the game. I could have written the name of the game separately at the top or bottom of the board, but integrating it into the board spaces seems simpler because it does not take up any extra space. I also jumbled up individual letters by slightly shifting and rotating them in different directions. This is supposed to make the text look like it is about to burst, matching the explosive nature of the game. I used complementary colors and black outlines on each letter to maximize visibility. The plain outlines of the original board have been shaken up a little with outlines that look more lively and, well, explosive, again matching the theme of the game. Finally, the sunburst effect in the background serves two purposes: it brings the board into the foreground, making it more visible, and at the same time reinforces the explosive / bursting theme. This design is certainly adequate, but there is no end to using NFDM to keep improving it. If I devoted more time to this design, I would experiment with these no-fluff ideas:
Why the No Fluff Design Method WorksIts results look greatI have found that when I create a design off the top of my head and a design that uses NFDM, the NFDM design looks much better. This is a hilarious irony considering that NFDM explicitly shuns visuals in favor of functionality and simplicity. But function and form are more interconnected than you would think, as are simplicity and beauty, so NFDM creates visually appealing results not despite, but because of its focus on usability and simplicity. For real world proof that simplicity and usability can lead to great looks, just look at any Apple product. NFDM can and should be used for things that are typically seen as purely aesthetic, like your choice of colors and fonts. NFDM also does not mean that your design has to be drab or boring- there is no limit to how many times you can iterate over a design and find a way to improve its usability, so you can indeed end up with very rich and colorful and sophisticated designs using NFDM - as long as nothing in your design is gratuitous. It eliminates clutterNot only will you get rid of clutter, but clutter will never even make its way into a product that was designed using a rigorous NFDM approach. By reducing clutter, the NFDM also has the interesting side effects of reducing costs and reducing confusion in the user experience. It questions everythingAs a designer using NFDM, you will need to question every decision you make, including some that you would never question otherwise. Why should your button be rectangular? What size and shape makes a pushbutton easiest to push, and how far should the button go down when it is pushed? What is the most useful size, shape, and position for the doors and windows of a room? This way of thinking is a great exercise because it forces you to make decisions very deliberately, and to research your decisions from a usability perspective before moving forward with them. It forces you to think like a 4 year old, always asking the question 'why?' on behalf of the end user. This is great not just because it is educational for the designer, but also because it ensures designers will keep their designs fresh by questioning old assumptions and habits. It is generalNFDM is not particular to any kind of product, so if you get creative you can use it to design anything, including the kitchen sink. It is scalableYou can use NFDM in a team setting as well. If anyone wants to add a feature, they will need to research their case and convince the rest of the team or a dedicated gatekeeper of the usefulness of the feature. If you cannot convince someone else that your feature satisfies the criteria of NFDM, it will not be implemented. It is never endingThere is no limit to how many times you can improve the usefulness of a design, so a skilled and imaginative designer equipped with detailed information about his end users can use NFDM to create arbitrarily complex and nuanced designs - very much unlike the Spartan Design that was the starting point. Beyond NFDMNFDM could be the only design method you will ever use on your product, but it does not have to be. More realistically, you would use NFDM to create a solid prototype and then tweak the resulting design using other considerations. NFDM will create the idealist design - the one that would be best for the end user. It is a good idea to make a solid effort for this ideal - putting in additional engineering effort to simplify the user experience rather than expecting the user to put in extra work to simplify the engineering experience. But sometimes you really will run into issues where the usability ideal is just plain impractical and you may make a small usability sacrifice for a large benefit in implementation. Also, though NFDM will get you a solid big picture, it is sometimes useful to make minor tweaks based only on aesthetic or engineering issues. Just be sure to do these things after you already have a clear picture of your No Fluff Design so that you do not significantly deviate from it. Back to Blog |
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