Should Good Design be Unobtrusive?

The short answer is probably yes, good design should be unobtrusive. The longer answer is that it depends on a number of things. New ideas or significant variations on existing ideas tend to be fairly obtrusive as they are unfamiliar and make us stop and think.

Examples

My favourite example of this in the world of web design is the tag cloud. The first time I saw a tag cloud it was a bit of an alien experience. I saw these different sized words and thought, well that’s interesting, is it art? Does it have a purpose? With a little bit of exploration I soon realised what it represented and how to use it, and it  became an obvious extension to more traditional forms of navigation including search. In some instances a tag cloud provides enough useful information just by itself, in terms of trending topics for example. It is very useful for a large site.

Breadcrumb navigation is another innovation that seems to have stuck. I heard about breadcrumb navigation before I saw it and I couldn’t quite get my head around it as described, but seeing it and using it makes it seem like common sense (although there are different ways of implementing breadcrumb navigation that can make a big difference to the user experience).

Unobtrusive then?

So when should design be unobtrusive? When it is an established convention or ‘norm’. As mentioned in the previous post there are a number of examples of this  and if things don’t quite work the way we expect them to then it jars us and makes have to think about what we are doing. As an analogy consider driving, we mostly do it without having to think concsiously about everything, but an unfamilair road sign would make us have to quickly process the information around us and decide a) whether we need to take action as a result and b) what that action is.

It can be a bit of a dilemma; as designers we want to push the boundaries, and innovate, and yet with a usability or accessibility hat on, we also want to make the experience as intuitive and automatic as possible. After all, a website that looks and works in exactly the same way as most other websites isn’t going to win any design awards. On the other hand, a website with lots of innovations or a completely different navigation system may be the bees knees but will it give the return on investment it needs to?

Please Comment

What do you think? Share some of your examples of good innovative design by commenting here.