159/Design gems, from Hardik Pandya
Earlier this week, I came across an article, ‘Design Org at Unacademy’. It was by Hardik Pandya, and once I read it, I knew I had to scourge the internet and read everything he has ever written. Some people write with a certain nuance or style, you can’t put a finger on what it is, but it draws you in.
He explains daunting concepts in the simplest language and makes a lightbulb flick right on in your brain. I want to write like that too. Today I finished slowly devouring all the ‘Notes’ on his website, and here are my personal favourite nuggets, and some thoughts.
Let’s start with the typography of the articles themseves. Creating a strong visual hierarchy with the bold serif for a title and clean sans for the body, with a slightly larger font for the heading points. Chefs kiss.
- Few places talk about the emphasis on elevating the perception of product quality through its aesthetics. I always considered it different from just the visual details. In the book ‘Inside Apple’ by Adam Lashinsky, there was a separate corner to talk about the packaging designer at Apple who spent months crafting the unboxing experience of an Apple product. Nobody talks about the box their appliances come in, but if you had an Apple one, I’m sure you still have the box somewhere. I know I do. It was amazing to see another designer talk about this difference between the internal product details and the overall aesthetics of a product as part of core design principles.
- “Design for intentional disclosure over discovery.” This is a crazy point and one I hadn’t thought about before. When designing complex products, we see this principle take the front seat, guiding the users through a new product when they first sign up and more are good examples but more often than not, we’re left to wander around and figure things out on our own. The designers do their best to simplify the options for us and go through the permutation combinations of the various paths a user might take but asking ‘What will be the right way for us to disclose this to the user?’ rather than ‘How will the user discover this?’ blew my mind.
- How design becomes a function of the business model. An absolute gem.
- “As you get more senior and start to lead a team, you’d be evaluated for 2 key things — What you delivered (quality of the work) and How you delivered (speed of delivery, number of escalations required, amount of design rework it took, timelines adherence…)”
- “Read what you write and try to misinterpret it — assume that that’s how most people are likely to interpret it, and then fix your writing.”
- “The best way to assess if these are done well is to assume they are not and start there.”
I want to break this off here, read the rest of the articles and come back with 2 more bits!
