As I mentioned on last week’s TIDE podcast, recorded live in the Lake District, this article from Amber Case about designing calm products is really useful:

Making a good product is an important responsibility, especially if the product is close enough to someone that it can be the difference between life and death. Even though the end result might by calm, designing a calm, human-centered product requires some anxiety and perfectionism from everyone on the team, not just the designer.

She's designed a Calm Design quiz, gives a score card for your product. As the quiz applicable to every kind of product, not just apps, it has questions that you can skip over if they're not relevant — e.g. whether the products has physical buttons with a blue screen.

It’s a clever way to package up design principles, I think. For example, without reading her book, and over and above regular accessibility guidelines, I learned that the following might be good for MoodleNet:

  • Stable interfaces
  • Grouping frequently used icons
  • Allowing users to prominently display favourite commands
  • Turning Notifications off by default (except the most important ones)
  • Plain-language privacy policy
  • Allow export of user data at any time
  • Include different notification types based on importance
  • Maintain some functionality even without internet connection
It's a great approach, and it would be very interesting to score some of most favourite (and least favourite) products. For example, as I said to Dai during the podcast when we discussed this, my Volvo V60's driver display would score pretty highly.

Source: Amber Case