[FEBRUARY] Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell

[Liz England]

The reading for February is Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler.

Universal Principles of Design is the first cross-disciplinary reference of design. Richly illustrated and easy to navigate, this book pairs clear explanations of the design concepts featured with visual examples of the concepts applied in practice. From the “80/20 Rule” to “Chunking,” from “Baby-Face Bias” to “Ockham’s Razor,” and from “Self-Similarity” to “Storytelling,” readers will expand their knowledge of 125 important and thought-provoking design concepts.

There's two copies of this book: the original (2003) and a revised and updated version (2010). I own the original so I'll be reading off of that, but I'd say go ahead and reach whichever copy you want. We'll just avoid referencing page numbers in discussion.

(This book won by a SINGLE vote, so I'll put the runner up on next month's ballot again).

[David Mikula]

For those with access to Lynda.com, there is a Universal Principles of Design course taught by William Lidwell and Jill Butler, based on content from the book.

[Liz England]

I'm almost done with this month's reading. I've jumped around a bit so I need to go back and see what principles I missed. I think I'll be coming back to this a lot as a general reference book to browse in my free time.

I liked that the principles are all over the place from different fields of design - graphic design, web design, usability/ux design, product design, advertisements, etc. It just feels like a really good cross section of design fields. It made me really wish for a game design book with a similar set-up, as a rundown of game design rules of thumb.

The only real caveat I have with it is that it suffers from some western-culture blindness. For example, the Gutenberg Diagram only works for right-to-left reading languages. I saw lots of other examples of this where the "universal" principle wasn't that universal.

Some of my favorite lessons:

Aesthetic-Usability Effect - maybe this explains Apple's popularity despite some of their usability problems. I've pointed to this effect before (without knowing it was actually a thing) regarding a lot of small indie games that don't get much press. I tend to believe that really nice visual design is part of usability since it invites people to use the product (game)

Cathedral Effect - ceiling height has an effect on the way we think. High ceilings = abstract, creative thinking. Low ceilings = focused, detail-oriented thinking. This is a favorite because the way our environment affects/primes our thinking is fascinating to me. Obviously this rule is important to architects/interior designers (I wonder if there's any relationship between avatar and ceiling height? probably not) but personally I find it useful when thinking about the spaces I work in.

Chunking - I already knew about this principle but liked reading more on it. There's a short GDC talk on how to use chunking in game design - http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022238/Rules-of-the-Game-Five (skip to Dan Teasdale's talk)

Desire Lines - this is a concept I've known about before, and a nice one that you can see all over the place if you pay attention (especially if it's just after a snowfall). But also useful for level design, especially for shared spaces like in MMOs or hubs. It brings to mind all the empty, lifeless spaces in cities in WoW that people would avoid, vs. the heavily trafficked areas.

Inattentional Blindness - Pretty sure all designers have run into this in playtests where dialogue/ui markers/visual effects/ etc. all try to draw the player's attention and fail spectacularly.

-Liz

[Catalin Zima-Zegreanu]

Agreed, Universal Principles of Design was pretty nice. I was aware of most of them, but the explanations and examples gave name to some of them I only knew intuitively. It's a good book for referencing it from time to time.


I've had this on my 'to check out' list for a while, and it seems to be the equivalent of this month's read for game design: http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Game-Design-Wendy-Despain/dp/0321902491
There's a sample of the book here: http://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780321902498/samplepages/0321902491.pdf and looking at the index there are some overlaps with "Universal Principles of Design" but there are also more game design specific principles, as you'd expect from the title of the book :)

[Liz England]

I hadn't seen that book but I've put it on my to-read list. Based on the index it looks really good and thorough. I might show up in book club vote a few months from now, Thanks!

[Kevin Day]

I posted this above, but couldn't figure out the formatting, so I deleted it. I got about 2/3rds of the way through, and found it really interesting. It was nice to find actual explanations for some of the design choices, especially since it was across multiple fields like previously mentioned. I particularly liked learning about the following:

Hick's Law

I had never thought about this before, but could possibly explain why some people in the IT field freeze when they get calls concerning large outages (at least where I work). I guess it also explains the Keep It Simple Stupid principal, but applying it to games it shows why some games seem to stand the test of time (Mario) compared to our more recent AAA blockbuster games. However, I don't think this is a fair comparison since our more recent games haven't had the same amount of time to age and see if they actually hold up. By giving players more choice or options, you could possibly cause them to be overwhelmed and simply stop playing your game. It also reminded me of this video by Extra Credits - https://youtu.be/jVL4st0blGU

Fitt's Law

I think I merely liked this since I am on a computer all day at work. It also reminded me of this old flash game, cursor*10 - http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/cursor10/

Desire Lines

I think I take these for granted, both in the real world and in games, but now that I know about it I quickly though of several places where this is observable in my neighborhood.

Thanks for linking the GDC talk, it was pretty interesting!

[Duncan Keller]

OK, finally through this one. In general I enjoyed it, these "big list of bite-size topics" books tend to be easy and enjoyable reads. 

Regarding what others have posted thus far... The Western bias angle is definitely something I hadn't considered before, a good thing to keep in mind whatever you're designing, I think! And cursor 10... that's a blast from the past! I remember playing that one during high school lunch!

The usefulness of this book was definitely a shotgun spread against a number of different disciplines and sub-categories of game design in my opinion. Many of them obviously skewed towards physical objects, but a lot were also straightforwardly applicable to UI design. The accessibility breakdown was a good one to keep in my back pocket and refer to later, I think. A few other piqued my interest...

Classical conditioning was an interesting one for me, because it seems to have such an obvious application to game design that I've certainly seen used many times, but had never directly associated with psychology in that way. The most obvious example I can think of is the Zelda jingles that play when you unlock a new area or get an item, or perhaps more aptly the sounds that play when you have a timed objective. I think it's pretty safely a part of the game designer toolset at this point, but it was a nice little revelation for me to associate the "game thing" with the psychology term, and a good way to remember to properly manage player understanding and expectation with familiar sounds and events.

"Common Fate" was another interesting one to me. That was the one where the groups of "X"s and "O"s moved around, and are associated into two distinct groups because of the direction of their movement, and not the actual shapes of the letters. I think the idea of being able to tie together disparate groups of objects by their behavior could be a very useful tool to a game designer... although admittedly I wasn't able to tie a bow neatly on this one. Maybe somebody with more experience could build off of this a bit better, but it was still pretty interesting to me. 

"Confirmation" was another one that I felt might have some good practical use. The basic example was a "are you sure you want to quit" dialog, which has an obvious analog to "are you sure you want to overwrite your save." But I thought it had other potential applications to gameplay. Maybe it's not a perfect example. but I was playing Deus Ex for the firs time recently, and I noticed how long the animation was for taking the rocket launcher out of your inventory. I thought about how it was actually kind of nice, because there are 10 inventory slots, so if you accidentally chose the rocket launcher, you wouldn't be able to fire it off right away, and would have a change to undo your mistake. Finding similar opportunities for players to change their course of action would similarly be a positive change. Although you can go too far in the opposite direction and be an annoyance, but I suppose it's a balance, like everything else. 

"Constraints" was another good one. Especially towards the beginning of the game. Although modern games have this problem to a way lesser extend than older ones, some games have a huge "what the heck am I doing" moment for new players at the start. Sometimes that can be part of the charm, though, for games that have many options and no clear path forward. Still something I'd like to keep in mind. 

Anyways, there were a few more I kept track of, but that about sums it up for me, I guess! Nice book, it'll make good reference in the future I think. The only major downside is just how many principles there were, it makes it a bit tough to track down ones you liked unless you made a note of it.

[Steven Lumpkin]

... Is this thing on??  I've never used google forums before!

I'm about halfway through Universal Principles of Design, and I'm really enjoying it.  I actually just used Common Fate at work today, as a principle to identify why some elements of our in-world UI felt disconnected from the objects they were related to.

For me, I think the most valuable part of this book has been reading up on the principles that make for good habits in communicating design- from legibility, to iconography- I think that area of my own work could use some attention, and it was really valuable to consider what this book had to say.  And it's always nice to be reminded of the cold hard reality of the Aesthetic-Usability Effect, especially when communicating designs outside the design profession.  As much as it may irritate me, a more attractively presented design will always look like a stronger design.  Gotta get cracking on those skills!