5 ways good design breaks barriers

Niwal Sheikh
UX Collective
Published in
8 min readJan 31, 2019

“The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.” -Ryan Holiday

Being able to traverse barriers means being able to see possibility where there is none. It means being able to open opportunities for yourself and others to create more innovative, effective solutions to the worlds problems. When we open ourselves up to possibility, we solve problems that were seemingly without solutions.

As a product designer it is essential to understand basic white-boarding skills, an exercise where the designer is given a problem and has to create a solution following the design process. After white-boarding consistently, I’ve realized the immense benefit in the design process itself, and the capacity for the process to solve a great deal of problems.

During my time as a product designer, I’ve come across the satisfaction of seeing the design process work wonders in terms of traversing barriers. The design process, efficient in theory and wondrous in application, has the potential to create bridges and break through barriers.

The following are a few ways that the design process worked in situations that previously wouldn’t have been able to be navigable by the same variables, and also how it opened up prospects for greater opportunities in the future.

1. Barrier of Communication

Project meeting for Picoz

As a fluent bilingual speaker in both English and Urdu, and a student in intermediary Arabic, I am no stranger to the fluidity and richness of new languages. Recently, I led a client project with a startup in Brazil called Picoz, in which their entire website was focused on an event organizing space. The scope of the project was a re-design of the booking and process flow, and it was a project replete with deadlines. There was a catch, however: because the startup was located in Brazil, the entire website was to be written in Portuguese.

In any normal instance at work, this barrier would prove to be a difficult obstacle to work with. The benefit of using an adaptable process such as the design-thinking process, however, allowed my team and I to translate the necessary tasks across the language divide and ultimately complete our tasks. We studied the culture and language norms of São Paulo at an attempt to better design for the consumers that would use the website, and consulted someone from Brazil each time we found our information lacking.

Working on a project settled in a language that was alien to me helped me realize how truly essential design can be in creating communication. Communication is more than just the words we speak, it’s understanding how to work together to produce results — regardless of distance, or divide.

2. Barrier of Understanding

When we use the terms “user-friendly” and “accessible”, we also mean “easy to understand”. Unfortunately, many products in tech don’t meet that quality and lose out on the opportunity to truly benefit a large number of consumers.

Part of a client project I worked on dealing with sea level rise zeroed in on exactly that: the scientific research the web application presented was using difficult words and terminology, and presented a huge barrier for those that were utilizing the service.

In the project, a key part of our redesign was to make sure that the website measuring sea level rise was easy enough for a middle schooler to understand, and useful enough for a climatologist to derive data from. To do this, we focused on testing user understanding of the entire website and highlighted pain points in terminology, legend use, comprehension, and more.

Lack of understanding presents a huge barrier in many of the products we use. It’s also very easy to assume that just because we understand a topic, everyone else does as well. Designing our products for understanding means framing our information in a way that is not only easily accessible, but easily understandable as well.

3. Barrier of Empathy

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. — Nelson Mandela

Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is a highly underrated character trait. Regardless of the buzz around empathy, consciously putting effort in exercising it while designing a solution is a great task.

In every problem we attempt to solve, it is essential that the solution is designed to the person facing the problem, and not just what we think the problem is.

A friend of mine recently was having trouble sleeping, and we were discussing various methods on how to alleviate her issues. Was it her mattress? Sleep schedule? Maybe she was eating the wrong things before bed? It wasn’t long before I realized that the questions I was asking were leading us down the wrong route, so I quickly tried a different approach: when was the last time she remembered getting a good night’s sleep?

We found out that the solution we were designing for was concerning a better sleep schedule, but in reality the reason why she was suffering from poor sleep was due to added stresses at work — a result of poor organization. By asking the right questions, centered around the root of the problem and not the effects of the problem, we were able to get to the heart of the matter.

The problem was framed as bad sleep, but the solution was dedicated towards building a process in which she was able to feel less stressed about her workload.

The example may seem small, but the lesson was huge: if I hadn’t questioned her thoroughly, I would’ve put effort in designing a solution that would ultimately not have had an effect on her, and failed to tackle the issue that existed. Empathy, for every issue, is essential in getting the job done.

4. Barrier of Opportunity

A good friend of mine, Xin Koepsell, worked as a marriage and family therapist for marginalized communities in the San Francisco, Bay Area. She encountered many people that not only didn’t have services offered to them, they didn’t even know the opportunity to use those services existed. She said there were issues that were designed to benefit a certain population that didn’t understand the barrier of opportunity, so solutions weren’t actually addressing the issue involved.

Designing for opportunity means making sure that the service is open for each and every user to utilize. This is a great deal harder because designing for every pain point possible is almost an impossible feat —and one that would take a great deal of time.

Xin gave the example of a product designed that aims to bring tech to homeless people in the Bay Area. Regardless of how efficient the tech is, it would probably get stolen, cause fights, be rendered useless, or best case scenario be sold and used to make money for food. Designing for opportunity would mean understanding the situation of the audience designed for, and focusing on the greatest pain points and needs in the situation.

I want to emphasize that good design is not the only answer to the worlds problems. Systemic issues such as poverty, oppression, corruption, whose consequences have lasting effects that will take generations of change to overcome, cannot be solved with user interviews and a digital app. The sensitivity to recognize this in the tech world is incredibly important.

5. Barrier of Accessibility

Recently, I just returned from a trip to my native country of Pakistan. I’m truly in love with the culture, food, and chai, but found room for growth when it came to the availability of resources provided to low-access areas. As a designer with a background in sustainable energy, I’m passionate about the potential tech has to provide infrastructural development, and I eagerly studied different solutions that were being pursued.

Increasing accessibility to power, I noticed, was a huge challenge that many NGOs/governmental organizations are dedicated to absolving. One method was concerning load-shedding: an instance in which electricity periodically shuts off through major cities, leaving everywhere from homes to hospitals and schools without power.

Electricity in today’s day and age is quintessential to living. When the access to electricity is taken away, those that are capable of purchasing power generators remain the only ones with access to basic amenities we easily take for granted: a working fridge, a heater, internet, etc. The access to electricity quickly becomes a game of who’s who, and unfortunately highlights a population of people that are left without it.

The old solution in Pakistan’s energy policy was to only increase electricity generation — a solution that failed continuously, as the problem was not just generation, but transmission: i.e. related to the way in which electricity traveled through the country, and highly susceptible to energy loss if designed poorly.

To combat this issue, many private sector organizations are creating residential areas powered by a central smart grid, in which power regulation by the private authority and excellent design in terms of generation and transmission stave away issues like power inefficiency, loss, and theft. These smart grid areas are proven to provide access to electricity to everyone that lives in them, and is a promising venture to increase the number of people that have access to life’s basic needs.

Designing with accessibility in mind makes efficient use of time and money, and it has proven to raise the quality of life for others. Overcoming the barrier of accessibility makes it possible for everyone to move forward as a collective.

Breaking barriers with design

The above are five key ways (among many) that the design-thinking process has helped to overcome obstacles. Some have been through personal experience, others have been through research, and still others are experiences my peers and mentors have been diligently working on.

Design is not the end-all solution to all of the worlds problems — but with the right thinking and application, it can definitely be a good beginning to start tackling them.

Interested in discussing this or more? Find me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter!

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Niwal Sheikh

Product Designer @ Plaid • passionate about web3, mentoring in tech, and warm cups of chai

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