Summary

This chapter began with a discussion about good design goals. You must implement four good design goals into any user interface: to implement ethical, purposeful, pragmatic, and elegant designs. The benefits of user design include lowering long-term production costs, focusing your energies on improving the product instead of fixing problems after your users have complained about them, and applying your design processes to other projects.

You learned about the constraints that users and designers face, and the gap this causes in producing well-designed user interfaces. You should try to bridge this gap as early in the process as possible, but if you can’t, you should acquire as much information from the users as possible about whether the designer’s outlook for the product matched the users’ outlook.