Getting the right design and the design right
Any company in order to put something on the market needs to first start with the definition of their offering. Where does the idea what to do come from? Is that the best place to start?
Over the years I kept wondering where does the creation process start in business. As an external designer I typically encountered two paths:
— someone coming with an idea for a solution I am asked to help developing,
— or someone coming with no clue where to start.
To me these are two phases of the design process. They attempt to answer two very different questions. The first one relates to problem solving while the latter to goal setting. First one relates to the question: — How do we build it? and the second to: — What is the right thing to build in the first place?
Getting the right design and the design right
Let’s start with a big disclaimer: There is no superior and mediocre phase of the design process. Even if you built the most brilliant solution that you set yourself to build, if it is something nobody desires, it is hard to call it a success (although I have heard numerous times the voices of the misunderstood creators saying: — My thing is revolutionary. People just don’t get it). On the other hand, if you had the most spot-on solution solving a big problem for many people and you executed it in a way that nobody can use it, it is a failure too. Thus in order to have a successful solution put out into the world both elements are crucial: getting the right design and getting the design right (following the nomenclature by Bill Buxton in “Sketching User Experiences”).
Getting the right design is an investigatory phase. It is a moment when a designer turns into a detective trying to understand why people do what they do. Becomes a bloodhound for the insights searching the weak signals indicating the uncharted space for creativity. Testing concepts to see what sticks, second-guessing, triple-checking, always seeking the revelation that is substantiated and truthful. It is a moment to activate the creative sixth sense to uncover and understand where the design opportunity lays. In is a phase where the skills of a researcher and a designer need to be combined. If this phase is not taken seriously, the designer turns into a gambler taking risks, thriving on the thrill of the unknown but ultimately compulsive and offering a false sense of control over the design process.
Getting the design right is the innovation phase. This is the moment to ask the question: — why not? and how else? To take risks in testing the different ways of solution implementation. To play with the unknown variables for the best outcome. Innovator does not shy from opportunities, experimentation and testing. He has his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground. He understands the constrains and is willing to adhere to them in new uninvented ways. He has the skills of a design visionary and an engineer answering the question: — how else could we improve on it? If this phase is neglected, the designer becomes an alchemist: a change maker throwing random things into a pot and hoping for gold. Sure, he believes everything is possible but some of it might turn to become fraudulent.
These two phases could be seen as the Yin and Yang of design. They combine the vision and the execution. Inspiration and planning. Creativity and rigor. Research and engineering. Neither of them can be left out as they to create a perfect universe of the design process.
Problem-thinking versus solution-thinking
Why it is so hard then to follow these two phases for so many people and organizations? The answer lays in human nature. As people we are simply more prone to think in terms of solutions rather than problems. Imagine that someone comes to you with a problem. How quickly are you going to start suggesting what are to possible options for action? Thinking in terms of solutions is evolutionary: when we were to encounter a sable tiger there was little time to consider the options. So, we jumped to the best solution that came to mind.
There is one more reason why we jump to solutions as soon as we can. Did your boss ever say: — Don’t come to me with the problems, come with solutions. Herein lays the root cause. Such statements train us to see solution seeking as an ultimate professional behaviour. Since all of us want to be seen as experts, we comply with the expectations of having a solution ready at hand. Expertise also means being in a driving seat when it comes to taking decisions, selecting ideas and claiming victories.
The need for acting like experts is the main reason why getting the right idea is often omitted in the solution development cycle. Yeah, I can hear many of you saying that you know your field and the needs of your customers but I guarantee you, you would be seriously surprised how little you know once you actually face your users. And it doesn’t mean that you are not going to recognize the issues they will bring forward. You will just not see how these issues should be combined and prioritized.
There is one more trap we fall into as experts: we tend to see our solution as central to the lives of people. Why else would every single app keep on demanding our attention every 5 minutes? Many years ago I worked at Oce Technologies Research Lab. Oce was known for making high quality professional printers. Our lab was envisioning the offices of the future and the different ways knowledge will be transferred at work. I remember one presentation I had with my colleague, where we had to convince the top management that workers’ life doesn’t revolve around printers. That printing is not even seen as secondary task at the office. It is simply a supportive action aiming to simplify knowledge gaining and sharing. Yet as experts in banking or telecom, we seem to imagine that our customers wake up in the morning with a sole goal to keep on using our solutions. So, getting out there to see how does reality truly looks like helps to feed our expert intuition and ultimately allows us to come up with better solutions.
Different people for different jobs
It is worthwhile to remember that people who are good at getting the design right are not as excellent at focusing on getting the right design. Getting the design right requires ability to look for potential problems, predict the bottlenecks, find alternative roads to take. It requires an engineering mind. A mind that constantly keeps on answering the question: — is it implementable?
People good at getting the right design flourish while facing ambiguity and the unknown. They are comfortable keeping an: — I don’t know — state of mind and do not have a compulsive need to immediately simplify the complexity of the surrounding world. They are not afraid to claim not to be experts in what’s out there. They just specialize in the tools that can extract this knowledge from others. The can be characterized by deep empathy and curiosity, forever asking: — why is it so?
Neither of these two qualities is better or worse. They truly are the two complementary sets of skills that address to equally crucial phases of the design process. And following both these phases pretty radically increases a chance for putting out there in the world a solution that is going to be appreciated by its users. It is just crucial to see that perhaps it is not the wisest decision to expect from the very same individual to be excellent in both these phases.
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Aga Szóstek, PhD is an experience designer with over 19 years of practice in both academic and business world. She is an author of “The Umami Strategy: stand out by mixing business with experience design”, a creator of tools supporting designers in the ideation process: Seed Cards and the co-host in the Catching The Next Wave podcast.
