Why design focus is so important nowadays!

When we talk about design we often think about luxury products. Products created with a special focus on look & feel. Apples iPhone, Vitra chairs or the Nest thermostat.

But that's a complete misunderstanding of design because design always means optics and function. There is no product out there which is not a so called "designer-product" because everything is designed in some way. The real difference is, that some products are designed with focus on optics or with focus on longevity for example.

That means, when I talk about "HMI design" it is always a combination of functionality and optical appearance.

A focus on the design of an HMI is no longer an optional task

In 1965 Gordon Moore defined in "Moore's law" that the number of transistors in technical components doubles approximately every two years during the period observed. That means, that the functionality as well as the complexicty of applications (can) increase dramatically as well.

In 1998 Jakob Nielsen defined "Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth" which says that a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year. (Nielsen's law is similar to the more established Moore's law)

Despite this progressive development of technical systems, there will be one limiting factor (forever):

HUMANS!!!

Defined as "God's Law" it is the human being which is the limitating factor in this game. Due to limited capacity of our brain the likelihood of errors or interferences with the task at hand increases drastically due to cognitive overload.

Cognitive load is the total amount of mental effort being used in the "working memory" of our brain. Cognitive overload, then, is the need for an excessive amount of mental effort.

With this knowdledge in mind it is absolutely clear, that we need to design any system or machine (and that of course includes human machine interfaces ) according to human needs.

The constantly increasing complexity of equipment and machines makes it an increasingly important task for machine builders to break down complexity and make systems accessible as well as understandable to people.

Conclusion

With the further development of technologies, existing problems and challenges are solved. However, increasing complexity also means that new challenges are constantly arising which we have to tackle if we want to remain competitive. 

This is exactly what "design" is all about nowadays. It is no longer a matter that can be ignored. It is an essential task to make systems and machines accessible.

It's your chance to be known for building products that are easy to use! :-)