I have been on a job search recently and several people suggested that making some business cards for networking was a good idea. Okay, so it is not that difficult to make a business card. However, being a software designer, it seemed to be a good idea to take a design approach.
There are two ways to design something, design it for your own taste and ignore the influence from users or design it based on users. Since the business card will be given to other people, I chose to base the design on the users. A business card includes typography and layout, but none of my experience is in that area. Of course, I decided to iteratively create the cards by getting user feedback and revising.
The first set involved some of my creative ideas. It would have been more creative if there was time and if there was more understanding of how to make the word processor to do what I desired. However, the feedback indicated that the creativity was not so important, because the main winner was clearly ahead of the others.
The second set involved varying font size, bold fonts, font colors, and right or left alignment.
The winners from the second round involved only small variations with font size, bold fonts, and alignment. With this third round of testing, people began to take too long to decide which design was better. They would sit and intently stare for a number of seconds and when they gave their vote they seemed to still be somewhat uncertain. A few of them even gave me a breakdown on why they chose one design over the other-as if they needed to be politically correct to the designers of the cards.
The final winner is shown below. It was a nice card, but needed nothing special about it. Maybe that is the final lesson. Typical users do not desire outrageous variations from the norm. And, small variations within the normal range require a lot more thought by the user to determine if it is better than some other normal variation. Maybe it is the cognitive load that really prevents us really making these distinctions. People have their own lives and they want to use their brains for their own lives, rather than on appreciating fine differences of a typical business card. This illustrates the diminishing returns of design improvements once you are within a normal range that is acceptable to a user.
