How do we ensure that we are designing based on facts, not guesses?
FOG research and design method.
Collaboration is critical for any product’s success, but ensuring we are making decisions based on facts is equally important. This is even more critical for startups, as mistakes could be expensive.
We all have our stories working with people full of opinions and guesses. Let me tell you a story from my past experience with a project. This was a pretty exciting project. The product manager, the engineering lead, and my team worked on concepts, validation, and getting all the design details for the team to start building the product. But, like in every story, there is a bad guy, let’s call him John. John thinks he knows better than others, and if you don’t do what he says, he would say you are not taking feedback and would make lots of noise. Then his boss, let’s call him Sam. Sam’s agenda is just to release the features and put a checkmark. He says he does not like designers because they bring more work. If you develop anything innovative or solve a problem through creative interaction, he would make sure that it is out of scope. The team would spend hours and hours on arguments and counter-arguments. Brainstorming with John and Sam means banging your head on the wall.
I am sure this is not just one stance, and you may be able to relate to many Johns and Sams in companies you have worked with. Therefore, I realized that brainstorming and having design thinking sessions with difficult team members like this is not the right approach, which inspired me to write this article about the FOG method I learned while working at Intuit.
FOG method is a collaborative process where you collect everyone’s ideas, opinions, facts, and any guesses for the feature or product on hand. This method ensures that everyone thought and ideas are heard, and as a team, you decide where you want to focus on. In contrast, in a typical brainstorming method, one with a higher rank or big mouth always shuts others down, and finally, the product suffers.
Why should you use this method?
- Avoid biases
- Hear everyone’s ideas and opinions, but design based on facts.
- Eliminate un-necessary arguments on people’s opinions
- Generate lots of ideas with no boundary
- Generate research questions for validation
How to use the FOG method
You can use MURAL or Miro to collaborate remotely with your team or after the COVID situation you can also do it in a conference room. This method can take about an hour or two, depending on the complexity and number of participants.
Homework
Before the sessions, ask your team members to do their homework. Provide them with information, competitive analysis, background information, and prior research related to the problem on hand. This will help them be more productive in the session.
Generate Ideas
Allow 5–10 minutes for the team members to write their ideas/thoughts on sticky notes. Let each person use a different color. Once they are done, go round the table and let them read their notes aloud.
Affinitize all the ideas
Once you all the stickies on the board, start grouping them based on their affinity. More is better, so if you don’t see enough stickies, give them some direction or challenge and do a second round of idea generation.
Any idea with quantitative or qualitative data to back them up will go to the facts buckets. Then, talk through the other stickies and, as a team, decides which are opinions and guesses. Opinions are thoughts based on your expertise and prior experience but may or may not have data to back them up. Assumptions and guesses are the buckets that need to be tested further before you can consider them in your design and product decisions.
Vote on opinions and guesses
Let the team vote on which ideas they would like to pursue further. Voting will help eliminate biases and ensure everyone has a say on it. This will also feed into the research.
Identify ideas to validate
Take the one with the highest number of votes for further research and validation. Generate research questions and decide how best you can validate the.
If I had done this method for the project I described above, we could have saved lots of time. When I was at Intuit, we used this method for a complex project which was not going well, and we got excellent results, and eventually, we turned that project to real success. I hope you can use this technique in your project and let me know if you have any comments or feedback on this method.
