Design is About Discarding Information

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. ~Steve Jobs

It is hard being easy. It is hard because being easy to use requires us to discard information. A human neuroimaging study finds it is harder for our brain to discard information than keeping it. And according to Timothy Wilson, professor of psychology and author of the book Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, our brain takes in, via sensory organs, 11 million bits of information at any moment. But only a tiny fraction of the millions of bits make it to our stream of conscious experiences. The rest doesn’t matter, mentally and behaviourally.

In design, it takes a lot of effort and time to sort through the messy mass of collected information and decide on which ones to use and which ones to disuse. A design project starts with designers seeking out information through observations, past projects, analytics, surveys, interviews and competing products. From the top of the funnel, the deluge of information then pass through design team’s collective mind sieve, in order to formulate hypotheses and prototypes and eventually a minimum viable product. At each stage, information get filtered and discarded and synthesised by designers’ judgement and team decision-making process.

Ultimately, designers’ output manifest as symbols, microcopy, interaction design, shapes and layouts structure. Those manifestations define the structure of user experience.

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Photo by Grooveland Designs on Unsplash