My name is Jon Bell and I really don't like these pants.

Look at them. Aside from looking pretty, you can't do anything with them. You can't ride a bike, you can't climb a ladder, and at that point why bother leaving the house?

To me, this is the heart of real world design. Not just asking what's cool, but focusing on what actually works for people.

There are a lot of phrases I remember from art school that we still toss around a lot: keep it simple, don't make me think, consistency is king. And my favorite, "form follows function".

Now I work at this great place called frog design, and I've noticed they took these basic concepts and expanded on them, which is how they make such amazing products.

There's some nuance there that I wish someone had told me about back in art school ten years ago, so I'd like to share some of these concepts with you today.

Let's start with consistency.

This is the amazon log in screen. It answers three primary questions:

Where am I? What do I need to do? What's going to happen next? These are all addressed fully.

But if you put on your consistency police hat, you might argue for something a lot less usable:

This page is a love letter to consistency. The relevant links are there, the familiar search box is there, the upsells are there, and so it is consistent. But the page suffers as a result.

It has become less predictable.

Predictability and consistency are usually on the same team, but sometimes they’re not, and you have to be ready to swallow hard and make something perhaps inconsistent for the sake of a better design.

This is the sign of an experienced designer.

A great example of this is how Macs handle the home/end keys:

Back in the day Apple made this brilliantly consistent way of navigating through text. Two main modifier keys with an arrow.

Windows, went in a ... shall we say ... different direction.

And in 1984 I probably would have said Apple had the better design.

But it’s 2009. Windows won, and they say home/end should go to the beginning or end of the line. So that's "correct" because of marketshare, not necessarily a more clean design.

Now, of course, every developer that tries to go from Windows to Mac inevitably wants their cursor at the beginning of the line, so they hit the home key, the screen jumps to top of the page, and you’ve just sacrificed predictability for consistency.

This is one I had a lot of trouble with at first. I overused the whole "so simple my mom could use it" line. My mom is a lovely and intelligent woman, but put me in a design review and my mom turns into a drooling moron as I describe every feature she couldn't possibly understand.

But this isn't the right way to address the mainstream. (or your mother) Number one, my mom is now on Facebook, Twitter, Brightkite, and Flickr, and sends me detailed usability critiques of the placement of Amazon's "continue shopping" button.

The mainstream has gotten smarter while we've been busy slagging on them behind closed doors.

But second, and more importantly, it is ok to develop apps for professionals.

This is Apple Motion, which looks complex because it is complex. A lot of people spend so much time optimizing for the first load that they forget about the 100th or 1000th.

Having a lot of features does not automatically mean something is poorly designed.

Take this cockpit. My mom would have no idea what to do with all the complexity here. Does that mean it's a bad design?

No, it's means my mom is not an airline pilot.

I know a pilot, and she says this plane's cockpit is a pain to use.

But I never would have known that if I relied on my gut. I had to get up and have a conversation.

Speaking of interviewing people, usability testing is hard, but that's no excuse to not do it.

I always said "oh darn, I don't have a million dollars, I can't possibly do user testing". What I've come to realize is that any little sliver of insight you can gain is better than nothing.

As long as you don't put too much stock in it. There are many reasons why data gets clouded, starting with the fact that people, well, they lie.

Speaking of liars, this is my good friend Bill. The expression on his face is pretty telling.

He is not enjoying the experience I designed, yet the words coming out of his mouth were things like "Oh, I see what you did there".

It wasn't until I watched the video that I realized how much trouble this interaction was giving him. I redesigned it.

It's vital that you be there, ready to listen.

My favorite example of this is here.

The Lisa team at Apple used to have default buttons that said "Do It" with this now-retro Chicago font. But it was only through user testing that they realized people were misreading this button.

They thought it said "Dolt", as in "moron".

So they changed the button to say "ok", and that's why we have ok buttons today. Problem solved!

What I love about this story is that this isn't data you would have gotten in unit testing, or a scrum, or two devs talking to each other. It just requires talking to your users, early and often.

[summary]

This was a tough one for me to learn, because it made me think of David Bowie's crazy pants.

And it's hard, because you can't learn this in a classroom, and you can't see it in a spreadsheet.

It just takes experience. But over my last year at frog design, I've gotten a deep respect for the power of emotion in design.

It's real, and it's powerful. And if you can learn how to harness it, you can do some really amazing things.

Like saving one of the world's greatest companies.