How Great Design Makes Us Think Better

One of the interesting things about great design is that it helps us think better.

But why is that? And how?

Typically with poor design, people become frustrated quickly and leads to confusion.

However with cleaner design, simpler concepts, it appears more user friendly and you get the feeling of mastery and control from the start. 

Great design brings a product or concept to a level of natural intuitive thinking, which creates us think better. The way this makes you think better is because your anxiety relaxes in your brain and allows for clearer thinking.

Take for example, learning Chinese, which can be a hard and daunting tasks, because you are learning a whole new language with a different writing system. How do you take something complex and design it better, even for a language?

This can seem difficult at first, but if you have better design, like the course I made for Memrise.com, you will naturally start to feel the language is more intuitive to understand and you begin to feel mastery and competency from the start. 

In this course, I used old form pictographs, which were drawings used in ancient times in China and morphed them into their current symbol.

Heaven (tian)

Sun (ri)

From these symbols, it starts creative thinking and interest, which is the foundation for learning and thinking better.

Often times, people need better design to get started in an area to become interested in it. Once they do, they become better thinkers and they forget that they are naturally learning.

If you were to contrast that with rote memorization, it would be easy to become inundated by it all and give up. Frustration will lead to failure.