Home as a heuristic

Good design starts here.

Set aside any images of your dysfunctional (or highly functional—lucky you!) childhood home. Now imagine your ideal home. What comes to mind? A Saltbox? American Craftsman? Converted warehouse loft? A child’s pointy box with two rectangular windows and puffs of smoke emanating from a chimney? What would your ideal home look like if you were from Burkina Faso, Telluride, or the 18th Century?

Anyone’s guess, I guess.

How would you define the ideal home if you couldn’t describe it in physical terms? You might describe how the ideal home would make you feel. Home as a place of peace and comfort, a welcoming place where your needs are met, your safety and security are ensured, and where you feel respected, appreciated, cared for — even celebrated. A place that’s well-designed, where things work as they should, and where there’s a natural flow between centers of activity and calm.

You’d probably describe a kind of Platonic ideal for home-ness, a set of characteristics shared by almost anyone from any region, culture, or era, whether that’s Burkina Faso, Telluride, or the 18th Century.

Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
— Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson

Maybe it was that brief time when I thought I’d become an architect (I wanted to design Eichlers, not skyscrapers), but I like to think of home as a foundational heuristic for useful, usable, pleasant experiences, a heuristic that underpins the design, development, and measurement of everything from features to functions, user journeys to usability.

I didn’t end up designing homes, though. I ended up designing products. Digital Products. Digital Product Experiences! In other words, websites, apps, and other chunks of interface and code. Ours is a field dedicated to using complex terms to describe simple things. Even the word heuristic is just a fancy-pants way of saying a mental shortcut or rule of thumb that simplifies the process of evaluating user experiences. Saying heuristic instead of rule of thumb, however, sounds science-y, lending an air of credibility to our ramblings.

Here’s a completely incomplete and unordered list of characteristics that I jotted down in two minutes that, taken…