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7 Essential Guidelines For Functional Design

Look at what you've made. Beautiful, isn't it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it, but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

At the heart of every piece of practical design, whether it be a website, product package, office building, manufacturing system, piece of furniture, software interface, book cover, tool, or anything else, there is a function, a task the item is expected to perform. Most functions can be achieved in a variety of ways, but there are some basic elements a designer needs to take into account to create a product that best fulfills its intended function.

These are the elements of functional design, the process of responding to the needs or desires of the people who will use an item in a way that allows their needs or desires to be met. Functional design is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, it describes products that work well to perform their assigned tasks; as a process, functional design is a set of practices guided by the principles that produce that positive outcome. (Functional design is also a computer modeling technique, but that's not what we're discussing here.)

By Dustin M. Wax

Look at what you’ve made. Beautiful, isn’t it? But does it work? For whom does it work? Of course you can use it, but can anyone else? In short, is it functional?

At the heart of every piece of practical design, whether it be a website, product package, office building, manufacturing system, piece of furniture, software interface, book cover, tool, or anything else, there is a function, a task the item is expected to perform. Most functions can be achieved in a variety of ways, but there are some basic elements a designer needs to take into account to create a product that best fulfills its intended function.

These are the elements of functional design, the process of responding to the needs or desires of the people who will use an item in a way that allows their needs or desires to be met. Functional design is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, it describes products that work well to perform their assigned tasks; as a process, functional design is a set of practices guided by the principles that produce that positive outcome. (Functional design is also a computer modeling technique, but that’s not what we’re discussing here.)

In order to create a product that works, there are seven questions you should keep in mind about the product you’re designing, who will be using it, and how they’ll be using it.

1. Consider the product’s goal.

Consider the screwdriver. The goal of a screwdriver is pretty straight-forward: to drive screws. Although there’s certainly a lot of room for innovation in screwdriver design — there are screwdrivers with more ergonomic handles, ratchet-assemblies, magnetic tips, and exchangeable heads — ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws.

Ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws. Image source.

Now, consider a website like Amazon.com. What is the goal of Amazon’s website? Amazon has a lot of different uses, some intended by Amazon and its designers and some not intended — you can look up reviews, compare product prices while you’re in a store considering a purchase, promote your brand by leaving lots of reviews, scam shoppers by creating fake storefronts, collect images of book covers for a school project, search book text for half-remembered quotes, and so on.

For the folks at Amazon, the website has one purpose: to sell stuff. All the features that allow those other uses were put in place as ways to sell more products.

But none of those are the reason the site was built. For the folks at Amazon, the website has one purpose: to sell stuff. All the features that allow those other uses were put in place as ways to sell more products. (And it seems to be working!)

2. Consider who will be using it.

Perhaps the single most important consideration in the design process — and the one most often forgotten — is the intended audience for the product. What works perfectly well for one user might be completely dysfunctional for another. And if the hoped-for users fall more into the second category than the first, you’ve got a problem.

Think about the way your parents or grandparents use their computers. Anyone with a bit of tech-savviness has probably fielded dozens of "tech support" calls from family members who are simply baffled by things like adding an email account to their email program, downloading family pictures from the Web, or dealing with a too-full hard drive.

Since CNN’s web-site is supposed to be used by huge and versatile audience, it has to work equally well for all its potential users if it’s to accomplish its goal.

Why do people have so much trouble with their computers?

• They don’t know enough about how computers work.
• They don’t have enough experience with computers.
• They don’t have time to figure things out.
• They don’t enjoy tinkering until they find a solution to a computer problem.
• The manuals are written in a dense, uninviting language that they find boring and difficult to comprehend.

Considering the kinds of problems they have can give us a clue about the kinds of questions designers should be asking about their audience.

• What kind of knowledge do your users bring with them?
• How much experience do they have?
• What kind of time do they have? Are they looking for a leisurely diversion or do they want to get in and out fast?
• What kind of personalities do they have?
• How much support will they need, and what form should it take?

Obviously there are likely to be several audiences for any given product. Plenty of computer users have the knowledge, experience, and personality types to easily do whatever they choose to do on their computers. If you’re designing a niche product — a website for Linux users, for example — perhaps you can get away with directing yourself towards only one, narrow audience. In most cases, though, a product has to work equally for all its potential users if it’s to accomplish its goal.

3. Consider what your audience intends to do with it.

As we saw in the case of Amazon.com, there are a lot of ways that users use a product besides those that directly fulfill the product’s main goal. In fact, every user comes to a product with his or her own intention — and they are rarely the goals that designers have in mind. For example, nobody in the history of humankind has ever wanted to record what was on channel Three between 9 pm and 10pm on Thursday the 27th — yet for years that was how VCR designers insisted we program our VCRs. No surprise, then, that few people programmed their VCRs.

Instead, what people want to do is record House tomorrow night. Likewise, your dad doesn’t want to configure his POP3 and SMTP settings. He doesn’t even want to send and receive email. He wants to send pictures of the baby to Aunt Jill in Iowa. Engineers and designers have long suffered from a tendency to substitute concrete specifications and processes for fuzzy user behaviors — but users don’t do that.

Engineers and designers have long suffered from a tendency to substitute concrete specifications and processes for fuzzy user behaviors — but users don’t do that.

Adequate knowledge of who your audience is requires some sense of what their intentions are and how they are going to think about your product. That’s what Tivo did when they replaced the complicated process of recording a show on a VCR with a process that better reflected their users’ intentions — just select a show you want to record and hit "Record".

4. Is it clear how to use it?

The best design, as often said, "speaks for itself". It is immediately clear — at least to its target audience(s) — what a product does and how to use it. Clarity is key to functional design. Probably one of the best-designed objects in the world is the ball. With minimal instruction even infants can use it!

In contrast, look at the website above. That’s the home page for Chipotle, the Mexican fast food restaurant known for its use of free-range, organic, and locally-grown ingredients. Not that you’d know that from the homepage. What you know is a) they have a logo, and b) there’s something you should know about jalape�o peppers. If there were no food scare involving jalape�os, you’d see only the logo. What do you do? We can assume the site has a goal — probably to get you to buy some tasty Mexican food — but how do you, the visitor, fulfill your own goal of finding what you want to know about Chipotle?

This is a classic example of what Vincent Flanders calls "mystery meat navigation" (presumably free-range, organically-grown mystery meat), a website navigation system so clever, so stylish, that visitors have no idea what the site does or how to do it. Make your product difficult enough to understand and it won’t get used at all — which means it doesn’t achieve its goal, which in turn means it doesn’t function.

5. How does your user know it’s working?

Remember in the Bad Old Days of the Web, when you’d make a purchase online and the "Submit" button would say underneath something like:

Please press the "Submit" button only once. Pressing more than once will duplicate your purchase.

We’ve come a ways since then, but it’s surprising how many times you still come across a website feedback form that doesn’t tell you when your message has been sent, or a search form that doesn’t tell you that it’s working on your request.

This problem is by no means limited to the online world. How often do you double-check to see that your alarm clock is set to go off, and at the right time, before you can relax and go to sleep? Or maybe you’ve run into this problem: you hit "Program" on your CD player (assuming you still have one) and key in the tracks you want to hear, but aren’t sure whether to hit "Program" again or just hit "Play" — and if you hit the wrong one, whether your program will be lost and you’ll have to re-do it.

These are all examples of inadequate feedback — it’s not clear whether you’ve completed the task you inteded to do or if there are more steps still required. While technically a product is functioning even if you don’t know it’s working, it’s not functioning well from the user’s standpoint — and products that don’t function well tend not to create very loyal users.

6. Is it engaging to your users?

One of the great products of recent years, at least in terms of engagement, is the Blackberry. Blackberry owners can’t stop fiddling with their devices — they check their email, flick the trackball around, check email again, send a text, scroll around the home screen, and then do it all over again. And again.

It’s no accident it’s earned the nickname "Crackberry."

Usability testing and paper prototyping are common methods to understand the way your target group will interact with you web-site and find out if it is engaging to your users. Image source.

Good design draws users in, whether through visual appeal, feel, ease of use, or sheer amazement. Anyone who has ever picked up a well-made hand tool and felt the desire to build something has experienced this — the tool just feels right.

This is, in part, the aesthetic value of the design — we are naturally drawn to things we find pretty. But aesthetics are hardly the limit of what makes something engaging. There are plenty of websites out there that are downright hideous — but they work. Those long form sales pages that litter the Web hawking "get rich quick" programs and miracle cures (like this landing page which won the SEOmoz landing page contest last year) are as ugly as human ingenuity can make them — but they consistently succeed in leading visitors (at least the kind of users that the pages are designed for) to the inevitable sale.

7. How does it handle mistakes?

How often have you visited a web page, realized it didn’t have the information you were looking for, clicked the "Back" button, and ended up on the same page again?

You made a mistake, to be sure — you clicked the wrong link — but that happens. It was the designer, though, who decided to make your mistake difficult to undo. Good design takes into account the possibility that users make mistakes.

Unless your only desired user is a member of that very small demographic of people who don’t ever make mistakes, your design should accommodate and even anticipate mistakes as much as possible. Web designers have come up with all sorts of ways to accommodate visitors’ mistakes, from persistent menus and "breadcrumbs" to 404 pages ("Page Not Found" pages) that link to the pages the websurfer was likely to have been looking for.

Designers who don’t make room for — and offer solutions to — users’ mistakes create non-functioning products.

Conclusion

Design is necessarily a relationship between users with problems to solve and designers with solutions to offer. Too often, though, users are left out of the designer’s considerations. Whoever designed the Chipotle site, for instance, had no conception of how any part of their target audience would approach the site. They had a clever idea — "it’s minimalism, man!" — and ran with it, to the detriment of potential diners, and possibly to the detriment of Chipotle.

Unless your specialty is creating concepts that have no possibility of being made into actual products, the ultimate goal is to design things that will be used. Think about how and why your product will be used, and by whom, as a central part of the design process to assure that your designs not only can be used, but will.

Related articles

You may want to take a look at related articles:

• 10 Principles of Effective Web Design
• 5 More Priniciples of Effective Web Design

About the author

Dustin M. Wax is a freelance writer and anthropologist with a long-standing interest in design. You can contact him or find links to his work around the Web at his site at dustinwax.com.

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Happy Friday everyone. I figured I’d close out the week with a quick tip. One of the new features in Lightroom 2 is the volume browser. I absolutely love it! I use external hard drives all the time and the volume browser finally let’s me manage them in an easier with Lightroom. It’s in the Folders panel in the Library module on the left hand side. The volume browser displays what volume (A.K.A. hard drive) you have your photos stored on so if you ever disconnect the drive you’ll be able to see which one to connect to get to your photos. Here’s an example of what I mean.

One of the things that’s cool is that the volume browser displays how much hard drive space you have total and how much is left. But if you right click on it, you’ll see there’s a few other choices like photo count, status, or even none (which I can’t figure out why you’d choose none). It’s a really neat feature so if you haven’t imported any photos from an external drive yet make sure you give it a try. It’s a lot easier now. Have a great weekend!

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Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months.

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So which wallpapers have we received for August?

Typography Technopop

“I love visually transcribing music, and having recently acquired some great Kraftwerk albums my inspiration ran rampant. The wallpaper is a transcription of Kraftwerk’s song Techno Pop.” Designed by Jonathan Haggard from United States.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050

Signalnoise A/V

“This is the abstracted idea of globalized television broadcast that came about in the 1940s to 1960s. The multicolored designs are my rendition of audio/video waves mingled with television feedback, which is how I imagine these signals floating above and beyond our planet. Even though they are, ultimately, invisible.” Designed by James White from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Dolphins are so 90’s…

“For me august equals summer. And what says summer better than the ocean? So i took the colorful theme from our website, threw in some waves, dolphins, cool summer sky and… some halftone patterns and mixed them all in.” Designed by Adaptd.com.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Monster Sushi

“Monster Sushi and is a product of procrastination — I came up with this character when I was putting off filling out some very important forms.” Designed by Regina Silva from Manila, Philippines.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

August Fruit

“One of the things that pop into my mind when thinking about August is fruit - besides summer and warmth. Plus I’ve just discovered the Museo font and I thought it would be perfect for the job.” Designed by Piotr Godek.

• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
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Night Fire

“The inspiration for this wallpaper came from a beautiful night sky and the flames of a bonfire flying up to the sky.” Designed by Henrik Wissing from Germany.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

August siberians

Available in 12 desktop resolutions — both widescreen and fullscreen. Designed by Vlad Gerasimov from Irkutsk, Russia.

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  800×600, 1024×768, 1152×864, 1280�1024 , 1280×800, 1280�960 , 1400�1050, 1440�900, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200, 2560�1600

Bird In Hand

“I made this image in reaction to what has been a very grey and wet English Summer and also to inject a little color and karma to my day. I hope it does the same for you.” Designed by Scott Jackson from UK.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Water Mellie

“She looked at me with that curious expression when I was swimming in my pool one lazy afternoon, thinking “Better not dive in!” While her mind follows the flow of the water, wave by wave. In fact, she was wondering how swimming feels like!” Designed by Athena Emi from Hong Kong.

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• with calendar: 1024�768, 1280�1024, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1024�768, 1280�1024, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Carrio

“Carrio has been designed in architectural terms.., like an idea for seatting on!” Designed by Ricardo Guillamondegui from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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• without calendar: 1024�768,1280�960, 1280�1024, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Refreshing Bubbles

“In this wallpapers the summer concept goes directly related to the high temperatures. For this reason I have wanted to dedicate the calendar of August, the warmest month, to the refreshing summers baths. The principal image is of an advertising cut of the 70s.” Designed by Alba Soler from Spain.

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Summer Time

“I’ve seen this guy several times taking a nap on the grass while I have my lunch in the park (Old Port, Montreal). He seems to be enjoying summer. I wish I could be as relaxed as he is.” Designed by Patricia Montero de Cabana from Maracaibo, Venezuela.

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• with calendar: 800�600, 1024�768, 1280�800, 1280�1024, 1440�900
• without calendar: 800�600, 1024�768, 1280�800, 1280�1024, 1440�900

3D Type

“I have fresh new wallpapers for you to give away for free this august. I chose autumn-like colors, and the theme is: typo-loving, and art nouveau.” Designed by Sandie Sørensen from Denmark..

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Agriculture

This wallpaper is based on the photo the designer has taken in a field. Designed by Radek Adamczewski from Poland.

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• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Augustography

“The typography is based on ITC Garamond, and while drawing I just started pulling random stuff, floating in my mind, into the design.” Designed by Arthur Dam from the Netherlands.

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Miscellaneous Days

“This version of a monthly calendar is about GTD (”Getting things dropped”) on your desktop: you can use the calendar to drag all the files on your desktop to certain days, when you expect to (hopefully) be working on them. If you didn’t make it - no prob - just drag them to the next day! For the time after August 2008, you can use the wallpaper for weekly “getting things dragged and dropped” on your desktop. It’s easy - and I hope it’s efficient.” Designed by Michael Schmidt from Austria.

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• monthly: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• weekly: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

My Fragile World

Designed by Maryam Kazerooni from US / Iran.

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• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Geometrical Flower

“This design is a big geometrical flower pattern, with each flower made up of smaller abstract patterns. Inspired by Escher and old Japanese Kimono designs; The patterns and abstract lines create a chaotic blossom full of movement.” Designed by Daniel Edmundson from Pernambuco/Recife, Brazil.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Purple Flame

“I’ve tried to make an ethereal, minimalistic wallpapaper. No collages or photomanupulation. I really like “relax images” in my workspaces. And I love purple!” Designed by Armando Sotoca from Spain.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Independence Day Of Pakistan

“When August comes it remind me of 14th August 1947 when my lovely country Pakistan was came into being. So, I am dedicating this wallpaper to all the lovely people of my country. This wallpaper contains National Monument (Pakistan) which is located in Islamabad.” Designed by Altaf Sayani from Pakistan.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Smashing Poker

Designed by Wade Bekker from Cape Town, South Africa.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Burning Sun

“August is the month filled with sunlight, yellow and sand, beach. The sun in this wallpaper comes from a mosaic a made for a table.” Designed by Nadeschda Broere from Holland.

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• with calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 1280�960, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Funny Grey

“I just wanted to play with nice typography and make a composition for this special month. I chose Elephant - one of the most marvellous fonts I’ve ever seen. Despite of the winter chilly days passing now in Argentina, I just marked out the first day with warm orange for one reason: it’s my birthday. Oh, by the way, the baby girl is my daughter Carmela against pollution and in favour of her plastic rabbit.” Designed by Martin Pruvost from Argentina.

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• with calendar: 800�600, 1024�768, 1280�960, 1440�900, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200
• without calendar: 800�600, 1024�768, 1280�960, 1440�900, 1600�1200, 1680�1050, 1920�1200

Join in next month!

Please notice that we respect the ideas and motivation behind artists’ work which is why we’ve given artists full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. And this is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but designed from scratch by the artists themselves.

Thanks to all designers for participation. Hopefully, in August we’ll receive as many entries as in July. Join in next month and smashing August, folks!