Richard Hart

Head of Something @ Somewhere
Kent, UK

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Business Design Principles

Facebook’s Four Business Design Principles is an excellent reference that should be at the core of every business tool.

Help people learn and grow

Balance efficiency and effectiveness

Bring clarity to complexity

Be accurate and predictable

The majority of my time these days is spent writing tools for business as opposed to consumer facing sites and trying to find the balance between ease of use and providing all the elements necessary to complete a task can be very difficult at times. I had not heard of the Goldilocks Principal before but it perfectly summarises this fine balancing act.

With a complex piece of UI, if you don’t simplify it enough, people can’t figure out how to use it. But if you swing too far in the other direction and over-simplify it, you risk dismantling the very value that people are looking to access through the tool.

When immersed in a tool it’s easy to become blind to the experience of actually using it. A good example are the drop down menus on a site I’ve been working on these past few years. Even though we would all use them day to day they were never really given a second thought. It was only after looking into how they were actually performing that it was apparent that they were actually really awful to use. Our own familiarity had caused a massive disconnect between how effective they were to use.