Decisions and design entropy

“The Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. The Design is how it works” — Steve Jobs

In the ’80s, software engineering began to transition to object-oriented languages so they achieve:

• code reuse
• data encapsulation
• easier software maintenance.

Design doesn’t scale easily like software.

Today, for our own good, a lot of Object-Oriented UX designers have started mapping out objects and trying to understand the correlation between them and how they behave in the bigger picture in a living and dynamic world. Design systems started to be “diplomatic agreements” among many teams for the ultimate goal to create a quality user-centered design product fast and with the minimum required human power that can scale in many environments.

Design should and must be Objective and not Subjective with rules and discipline. Design Systems and research can help any product to grow. by Michail Kouroupakis

What is entropy?

Entropy is a measure of the number of possible arrangements the atoms in a system can have. The higher the entropy of an object, the more uncertain we are about the states of the atoms making up that object because there are more states to decide from. A law of physics says that it takes work to make the entropy of an object or system smaller; without work, entropy can never become smaller — you could say that everything slowly goes to disorder (higher entropy).

Entropy is important for decision making in many fields ex. data science but also in a social ensemble with the same goals ex. a company. People tend to evaluate information from a personal context: How does this affect me?

So more people, more opinions, more time to decide. Personal filters and continuous renegotiation have as an effect High entropy which is time-consuming and it is obviously not very good for team collaboration and decision making.

Think a room of people with too many opinions. If they need to discuss each other what is good to do it is obvious that this will take time. So it will be very hard this group of people to decide what to do next.

On the other hand, ownership, tracking progress and value, planning for steady goals, hiring people who know their field, can lead to eliminating decisions, could lead to lower entropy. Knowledge and experience is important and you need to select wisely to whom you will give that ownership in order to eliminate entropy. You need to know how to hit a nail with a hammer. If you do it slowly with no power you will do nothing if you do it fast with power you will break the wood so hiring is really important. You don’t want chess pieces but people who can make smart moves. As we have shown before, “without work, entropy can never become smaller”.

Think a room of people with too many opinions. But now give the ownership to one person. This person and only this person will discuss every opinion. After that this person will filter these opinions and will decide what is the best think to do. This is a much faster decision making process.

What is Design entropy?

With little imagination from the second law of thermodynamics is defined as a description of the disorder found in design objects. (messy!=entropy)

The appearance design entropy (layout, density, form), interaction design entropy (easy learning, efficiency, error rate), and total user experience (Pleasure, Reliable. Impressive) have a correlation relationship. Low entropy design causes a higher user experience.

Left side: A mobile phone with and image and one button. Low entropy design // Right side: A mobile phone with buttons and one image. High entropy design

Although there are products with high design entropy. The solution to that is training. ex. airplane dashboards. Sometimes we want our product to have a sense of high design entropy (ex. for security reasons).

You Need a Design System to combat Design Entropy to avoid:

• design & technical debt
• poor communication
• multiple unintentional and competing mental models.

Design Entropy matters and it is vital to understand how entropy could affect your decisions in order to:

• define user’s mental model, and match them with business needs so you will improve the experience
• ensure simplicity, reducing any complexity
• grow and maintain your product
• build better APIs with portable, independent objects
• get SEO structured content

In order to protect your product or service from opinions try to make decide at start the goals of every sector of your business. In our case Design System.

How do design systems help to combat Design Entropy?

People will always try to convince you to achieve their opinions. It doesn’t matter if you work hard; you need time to think about the value and the impact of what you do. Be slow to go fast. More time spent preparing up think the front means less time down the road. Iterate faster, design less, and make solid design decisions without trends in mind. Stop unnecessary discussions that are a waste of time and choose your fights. Fight more for things that will “break” the user experience than if the sky is cyan or light blue.

With a design system you can say strategic no and yes in order to focus at the important things of your product/service

For this reason, Design Systems are a great cheat of time, so you can think twice about how you implement any feature and where to place an element or vanish it. Taking the extra time to think before acting is a blessing. It is like you are Magnus Carlsen and you can understand the game because you have more time to think or if the environment needs it, you can act fast with precision and without pressure.

“A design system is a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards, that can be assembled together to build any number of applications.” by Will Fanguy

Sources & Nice to Read:

Dave Collins: Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

Benjamin Ricaud: A simple explanation of entropy in decision trees

Wu Lei · Juan Li · Tian Lei: Design Entropy: A New Approach for Evaluating User Experience in User Interface Design