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Book Review: Universal Principles of Design

Book | Authors | Review

By , SAP AG – August 29, 2006

This review takes a personal look at William Lidwell's, Kritina Holden's, & Jill Butler's book Universal Principles of Design.

Book

William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, & Jill Butler
Universal Principles of Design
Rockport Publishers, 2003
ISBN: 1592530079

Design: General

Authors

William Lidwell is an artist, author, designer, and entrepreneur. He is co-author of the books Guidelines for Excellence in Management (Thomson, 2004) and The Thoughtful Leader (AMSI Press, 2004), and is a regular columnist for O'Reilly's Make Magazine. His newest book, Deconstructing Product Design, is scheduled for publication in the Fall of 2007. William is the founder of multiple companies, and is currently focused on launching his newest venture, WOWIO, in the Fall of 2006. Please visit the SCDS Gallery to view limited-edition art by William Lidwell.

Kritina Holden is a Human Factors specialist at Lockheed Martin–Space Operations and NASA, where she is responsible for performing applied research on HCI topics for the space environment. Formerly a Lead Usability Engineer with BMC Software, Kritina is author of numerous guideline texts in the areas of human-computer interaction and human performance.

Jill Butler is the founder and president of Stuff Creators Design Studio. She and her staff help clients explain concepts and express themselves through graphics, interaction design, web site design, printed products, and custom-designed 3-D objects. She has worked as a print designer, information designer, and multimedia designer for herself and various companies in the Houston area. Jill served as a lecturer and taught design-related classes at the University of Houston and Kingwood Community College.

All bios from online addendum Website: www.stuffcreators.com/upod/authors.html

Review

Executive Summary

Have you ever asked yourself what principles like the 80/20 rule, progressive disclosure, or the Mental Model are? Then this book might be what you were looking for to get a sound definition of each of these. Just as the title states, the book collects 100 design principles and explains the reasoning behind them. When you read/browse through the book, you will realize that these principles are not artificially created but mainly based on nature and our humanity, perception, and education.

Target Group

The book is intended for students, instructors, designers, and researchers of interactive systems coming from such diverse backgrounds as computer science, psychology, industrial engineering, technical writing, communications and media, product design, graphic design, and education.

Discussion

Lidwell, Holden, and Butler have collected 100 different design principles, formulated definitions for them, and put them into an accessible explanatory format. Each of the 100 design principles gets a double-page representation; a written page plus explanatory sketches/pictures. This makes the book an easy and quick reader. The definition texts are written for quick and easy understanding, focusing on brief explanations. The associated pictures have the same focus and are the visual demonstration of the design principle and directly support the text context.

In design contexts, we often encounter unsound and unclear argumentation, since parts of the collected arguments look like they are gathered from a supposed common sense perspective. The authors of this book bring a little bit of light and stability into the fuzzy world of buzz-word dropping. Up to this point, readers needed intensive research and significant background knowledge to find the right literature on the different topics.

By defining a huge range of the “subjectively perceived” principles, this book brings a little bit more clarity into argumentation that was previously difficult because some arguments seemed to be only subjectively perceived. This book not only gives a brief overview on the topic, but also lets readers dig more deeply into literature, since each of the descriptions also lists additional sources of literature. You can follow up on often used and heard principles, which in the past were seldom defined effectively.

The book is categorized based on 5 questions (such as “How can I influence the way design is perceived?”) and sorts the 100 Universal Design Principles according to these questions. This basic structure is the way the book guides readers through the content. Otherwise, the book is suitable for browsing. This is the only real criticism of the book, because you can never be sure that specific design principle that you want to research is explained in the book.

By its very nature, the content is unstructured because the book is a random collection of the most commonly heard concepts. A second edition of this book is thinkable, since more Universal Design Principles can be definitely discovered.

Conclusion

The book is a great reader. You can either browse through it or dig into it with a specific purpose. It is both a source of inspiration and reflection on perceived design. It is definitely a worthy investment for anyone interested in design and – last but not least – it is simply fun to read and follow-up on the different perspectives on design.

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