One thing that really confused me in design school was the emphasis on good design and bad design. It was odd to me that this field placed so much emphasis on showing what good and bad is, instead of just giving us the rules to make something good.

Somebody studying mathematics, engineering, medicine, literature or anything else, is just taught the right way of doing things in their fields. At most, they are taught about failures as cautionary case studies. Why then, is it that so many programs insist on designers understanding what bad design is?

I am sure, like most things, that the practice has just been accepted by professors taught by their professors as the standard way of teaching. But if we look at it from first principles, it starts to make sense.

With something like engineering, failure is very easy to define. If you do not write good code, your product will fail, at some stage at least. The bridge you construct will topple in the rains, the patient you treat will continue to get sick. There will be a very clear indication that your work has failed, and requires a further round of iteration and improvement. You also have a somewhat clear indication of where it failed, or can logically reason to the point of failure.

This failure only makes you better at your job, because you know to avoid it the next time.

With design, failure is much less dramatic and often does not even get raised. The world, in general, is poorly designed, and people have accepted that. Users are comfortable with the inconvenience of bad design because it is simply everywhere. Friction, in your design is barely registered in the users head. It is just felt.

There are very few direct markers of failure in design, usually to do with accessibility. With that you can very clearly spot failure. Over here we can also introduce the term “horrible design”. Horrible design is different from bad design because it is easy to spot. It fails visibly. It looks bad, feels completely wrong, and demands the user to take considerable cognitive effort to figure it out.

Horrible design is easier to fix than bad design. Bad design registers as a small feeling, a frustration or point of friction that never gets called out. Even to verbalise it takes effort.

A designer can spend an entire career producing bad designs, because they simply never had to account for these failures. That is the danger of bad design, and the reason for the emphasis on it. Because spotting it is so hard, a designer needs to get really good at it. Be able to see it everywhere, because only then can you see it in your own work.

To avoid bad design, and to create good design, you need to get into the head of the user, understand what they are trying to achieve and the smallest of cognitive barriers that may come in their way. Understanding is the biggest part of this, solving is a less intense problem then. And once you do that, you create products that “feel right”.