Good Design must bring together all Touchpoints

Good Design must bring together all touchpoints that involving physical, digital, and human interactions. 

Design was always and is, from my point of view and understanding, whether I designed and worked as urban planner, architect or now as designer a city, house, furniture or digital product - Design was always and is the deliberate, holistic creation path of various needs, expectations, and touchpoints and the experience a person already made and will see in the future.

It was and is always about a complete and whole journey of users, customers as unique as possible but balance to the mass of people, why they engage, what they need, what they want, and working within reasonable constraints to provide that.

Within the world of design we use so many terms - HCD, UX, UI, IxD, UCD, CX, Service Design, or Design Thinking or any other creative terms.

Designing something always is build on good communication and a language which everyone can understand and want to understand whether we talked with or to UXers, designers, developers, managers, stakeholders, end-consumers, clients or anyone else. 

Year by year I think I am getting too old for another buzzword - new terms for design - if it helps people to understand that good design is indispensable - fine by me use another term - as long as we get to better outcomes and teamwork.

My basic idea and my central principles for good design regardless of whether I designed buildings and cities in the past and virtual and digital things today are pretty easy – they are…

• Utility
• Usability
• Desirability

The Oxford Dictionary defines utility as ‘the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial’ ( http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/utility ) , and the ISO 9241-11 defines usability as ‘The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.’ However, the main lesson in all of this: without usability and utility, you can't really create desirability.

And if you get utility, usability, desirability together you get UX - as the intersection / sum of them. Great look and feel, aesthetics and brand experience make whatever you designed or developed outstanding.