Quality
Quality is the ultimate standard of design.
Quality is a judgement of how good something is. It’s a term that can be used to describe anything that’s been made, yet the specific meaning of ‘quality’ is inexorably dependent on the object that’s being described.
Quality is something that we’re able to instinctively perceive when interacting with some thing, but expressing precisely why we feel a certain way about it can be challenging. As a concept, it’s characterized by a combination of objective, subjective and intersubjective attributes.1
“Quality...you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality.”
Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
A useful way to understand quality is to view as a spectrum of increasing excellence. Within a design framework, products can be classified along this spectrum as being either lower or higher quality. A high quality product meaningfully upgrades an experience in ways that competing alternatives don’t or can’t, whereas a low quality product delivers an experience that’s disappointing for users. 2
People love to own and use high quality products. Better products create better experiences for people, which is good for customers and a fundamental aim for any designer.3
Product quality
This is what quality means generally. But in order to actually build something of high quality, it’s useful to have a framework in place for understanding what quality means specifically.
To understand what is meant by quality specifically, it helps to envision it as a mosaic of product characteristics that collectively shape a user experience.
The five major characteristics of high quality design include:
Utility: High quality products serve a function. They are useful and create meaningful value for those that use it.
Simplicity: High quality products are easy to use, simple to understand and highly explainable.
Engaging: High quality products are engaging and keep people coming back for more.
Crafted: High quality products feel incredibly well-made. This is often what most people associate with the term “quality”.
Narrative: High quality products have a clear and compelling narrative that draws people in.
The interesting thing about framing design quality in this way is that it expands the surface area with which product design can have an impact on overall product success4.
Let’s explore each of these characteristics a bit more.
Utility
Products are built to create value for people, which is about addressing customer opportunities that help people upgrade some experience in their lives.
“Good design makes a product useful. A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.”
- Dieter Rams
Utility is delivered through the capabilities built into the product experience. Those capabilities can come in the form of features, technologies, communities or something else that the product enables.
The lines between the utility that a product offers and the upgrade it provides to customers can be blurry. The primary distinction between the two relates to what a product does versus what a product gives. Utility is delivered through what a product does, namely, the specific value that people get from using the functionality a product offers. On the other hand, upgrades are delivered through what a product gives, namely, the positive life changes customers get from owning and using the product.
For example, an app like Instagram helps users build and maintain soft relationships with people that they care about. That is the upgrade. The utility of the product is contained within the functionality of the app. For Instagram, that includes features like sharing photos, likes, comments and so forth.
But it’s not enough for a product to merely be useful to people. Adopting a new product is a hassle. Because of this, a new product has to be significantly more useful and uniquely different in order for people to truly care about it. If the utility a product delivers to customers is only marginal relative to what they currently use, they’re unlikely to be willing to go through the pains of trying something new.
Simplicity
If we think about product quality as a hierarchy, then utility is almost always at the foundational level. A product has to serve some purpose and function. From there, the simplicity of a product is the ease with which a user can access that utility.
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful” -
John Maeda
Simplicity as a characteristic of product quality is something that is sought after by both designers and consumers equally.
Products that are simple are just right. Through intuition and maybe a little bit of tinkering, we can quickly grasp what the product does, who it’s for and how it helps. Everything about the product seems essential, obvious, natural and easy to use. In the modern age, with few exceptions, if a product is not simple to use it will not be used.
The most direct route to understanding simplicity in product design is through the lens of interaction costs, which is the aggregate effort (mental and physical) involved in interacting with a product or scenario. For designers who want to make products that are as simple as possible, reducing interaction costs is a central objective.
Reducing interaction costs means focusing on classic usability measures that improve product experiences, like increasing efficiency, minimizing errors, designing for accessibility and much, much more.
Products exist to create value for people, and accessing that value should be as easy and simple as possible. But the goal of simplicity should not impede on the goal of maximizing customer utility. High quality products are those that maximize utility while still keeping things simple.
Engaging
Great products are often also incredibly engaging in some way.
When people use a really high quality product, there are usually aspects of the product experience that keep them coming back for more. There is a certain quality to the interaction that makes these products fun to use and foster loyalty from users.
Products that are engaging bring a bit of flavor to what would otherwise be mundane interactions and experiences. Done effectively, building features for engagement can even be designed to reinforce utility.
Another commonly used term with regards to building engaging products is ‘delight’. Really engaging products evoke a feeling of delight in users. The Nielson/Norman Group has outlined a great theory and framework for understanding ‘delight’ in the context of creating engaging products.
They split ‘delight’ into two categories:
Surface Delight: Surface delight is about design that is aesthetically pleasing. The way a design is constructed, the animations that are used, the interaction patterns that are implemented and other surface level product features make using it an enjoyable experience.
Deep Delight: Deep delight is the ultimate goal when it comes to creating products that are engaging. Deep delight is about the immersiveness of the interaction that a user has with a product. Products that deliver this form of delight leave the user with a feeling of deep satisfaction.
The richness of interaction is an important consideration for designers of all types of products. Once you’ve figured out what your core utility is and how to get people to access that with ease, focusing on how to engage users more and more will always be beneficial.
Crafted
High quality products feel incredibly well made. They feel crafted.
Sometimes used together and other times used interchangeably, ‘craft’ and ‘quality’ are sister terms that are deeply intertwined. When we use products that have been truly crafted, we get satisfaction from the noticeable skill and effort involved in making that thing.
“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
- Charles Eames
The difference between a well-crafted product and one that is simply average is the level of execution regarding the quality of the build.
Highly crafted products share several characteristics that set them apart:
Extreme attention to detail and intentionality: Intentional decision making with respect to the details designers include and don’t include in their products. Well crafted products feel well reasoned, meaning every aspect of the build is the result of thoughtful deliberation and refinement. There is a clear sense of focus coupled with an absence of sloppiness.
Product personality and character: High quality products are often a reflection of our ideals and values. We actively search for products that match our personality and reinforce our beliefs about ourselves, both in what we are and what we hope to be.
Aesthetic appeal: To novices and experts alike, excellent visual quality is synonymous with overall product quality. For many people, products have to look great to be great. Through a combination of objectively attractive design qualities, personal preferences and the current cultural wave, highly crafted products have a certain aesthetic appeal that others don’t.
Reliability and durability: Well crafted products are dependable over a wide range of use cases, scenarios and time periods. Some of our most beloved products are things that we can always rely on and have withstood the test of time.
Narrative
An aspect of product quality that’s often overlooked is the importance of a clear and compelling narrative.
Value and narrative are closely related. How you communicate your product has important and obvious implications on customer perceptions of quality. Until a product story is communicated in a way that resonates with customers, there is very little chance that the value the product offers will ever be realized.
Closing notes
The quality of any given design affects our quality of life, in ways both big and small. Bad design can be incredibly frustrating and taxing on our day to day experiences. On the other hand, quality design can bring value, joy and satisfaction to our everyday experiences.
This is why quality is the ultimate standard of design.
But quality is not an end state, it’s a search that designers actively engage in. Aspiring to quality design is a commitment to continuously pursuing perfection while knowing you’ll never truly reach it.
Quality is partially inherent and partially perceived. Many product domains have inherent quality characteristics, like the types of materials used to make a desk. On the other hand, quality is also partially in the eye of the beholder.
Products become experiences through interaction from people. Any and every interaction that people have with a product has an associated user experience. User experience encompasses all aspects of how people use the product, the sum of interactions they have with it and the associated thoughts, feelings and actions that occur at various stages of the interaction (before, during, after).
Any kind of design is a form of experience design, but we cannot directly design the experiences that people have. Product designers have no say in how a person will experience a product because experience is internal to the person using the product. However, the decisions we make to shape the quality of the products we build are very much influential in the process of user experience formation. A user experience is the byproduct of the interface and interaction decisions we make, as well as the other contextual factors at play.
There are three factors that influence the experience people have when interacting with a product:
The product itself: The decisions made about a product's appearance and functionality
The user: The set of life experiences, emotional predispositions, values, mental models, etc that people bring to each product interaction.
The nature of the interaction: The interaction is how the product and the user come together. Some aspects of the interaction are in the control of the designer (i.e. defining interaction modalities) and others are out of the control of the designer (i.e. the context the user is in during interaction)
There are several reasons for why some products succeed and others don’t. Things like business viability, technical feasibility, product affordability and many other things play a major role in a product’s overall success. It takes way more than good design for a product to do well, but good design will usually take it a long way.