Good design is often underrated or undervalued. People focus a lot on what something looks like and whether they consider it to be user-friendly.

However, user-friendliness is not the same as usability. Design encompasses so much more than aesthetics. Design sits at the core of everything: aesthetics, user-friendliness, usability, functionality, scalability, flexibility and level of standardization just to name a few criteria.

Of course there are factors that relate to the target audience and the market / industry, but good design is generally universal.

As a second measure of quality, try explaining the design over the phone to someone, preferably someone who’s from another country / lives under different cultural circumstances / has a different mother language, to test your design.