I had the privilege of attending an Edward Tufte conference here in Portland. After the brain melt that is inherent in listening to or reading Tufte, I gathered my grey matter and compiled some thoughts on the day. One of our clients suggest that I distill this into a Top Ten list. Here it is:

1. There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. Manage clutter by fixing the design. To clarify, ADD detail.
2. 90% of every screen should be content, NOT marketing, not including navigation. People generally don’t do a Google search for ‘pretty design’ or ‘marketing fluff.’
3. Get out of the dominance relationship with your audience—let them use their own cognitive styles. The way you gain credibility with your audience is your demonstrated mastery of detail. Make the design about the content, not the design.
4. The lower the resolution, the longer the meeting: clarity is key!
5. Show your information at once, adjacent in space, rather than stacked in time. Known in powerpoint as ‘one damn thing after another!’
6. Start with the interface design and at as high a resolution as possible and let that drive the process.
7. Reduce design variation to allow the viewer to concentrate on evidence variation.
8. Be aware that your presentation will stand or fall on the quality, credibility, and relevance of its content.
9. A good test for a design is whether or not it evokes responses tothe content.
10. Grand principles of design:

* Show comparisons
* Show causality
* Show more than 1 or 2 variables-serious problems are multivariate, show multivariate evidence
* Integrate word knowledge and image: use annotations to pieces of content to help interpretation
* Document everything and tell people about it: documentation is a quality control mechanism and determines credibility
* Be aware that a presentation stands or falls on the quality, integrity, and relevance of the content. Good design cannot salvage failed content. Science is a content-driven enterprise.
* Use small multiples
* Don’t Dequantify: Thinking and designing are as one.

“Elegance in design is achieved when you have removed everything possible, not when you have added everything possible.”

I love this observation found in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. When I first read this, it immediately made me think about usability testing - the process of observing users unfamiliar with a site as they try to complete specific tasks on that site.

New observers are almost universally struck by the divergence between expected and actual behavior. For me, it is a humbling experience to watch users ignore seemingly “can’t miss” parts of the page, to fail to complete the easiest tasks given to them, and become irritated with the features that were supposed to impress or help them. Running counter to the tendency and desire of most of us (designers, developers, clients) to add whizzy new features or innovative design elements, the results of usability testing constantly reinforce the importance of simplifying, clarifying, and focusing every page on a site for a specific purpose. Usability testing reminds us that design elegance is achieved by removing as much as possible, and that simple, focused sites are preferred by the only people who really matter: our customers.