“Good design is consequent to the last detail”
Dieter Rams
If you’re unfamiliar with the source, this quote comes from Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles for Good Design, and if you ask me, it’s the one principle to rule them all. It continues, “Nothing should be left to arbitrariness or chance. Thoroughness and accuracy of design are ultimately an expression of respect for the consumer.”
If you’re American, you’ve likely also seen it translated (from German) as “Good design is thorough to the last detail,” which I find interesting because it changes the meaning in a slight, but significant way.
We don’t really use consequent the way Germans do, or at least the way Dieter is here. We use it to mean “one thing that is caused by another” or “resulting from,” but Dieter is using it as an antonym for “arbitrary.” He’s saying that the quality of design is inversely proportional to the amount of it you let happen by chance.
The way I think about it is any little bits of arbitrariness, where things are not thought through, are logically inconsistent, or are allowed to happen as the consequence of a decision we made passively, are noise in the signal of our design.
Unfortunately, one of the things we are really good at, as a species, is finding patterns in the noise – assigning meaning where there is none. If you present the user with little bits of arbitrary noise, they will bend over backward to infer meaning from it. That meaning will be false and will undermine the intent of the design.
This is why, on my team, we strive for “as little difference as is meaningful.” It helps us keep our ratio of intentional decisions high, and it removes information from which users can make incorrect inferences. Or, put more succinctly, it lets us, and the user, focus on what matters.
When we translate “consequent” as “thorough,” I think we only get the idea halfway. It feels like it could mean we dotted our “I”s and crossed our “T”s and made a list and checked it twice, but I think that’s missing the point. I think what Dieter means is closer to “Intentional,” so that’s the way I use it in my practice.