How chess makes you a better designer
Chess has become a very popular lockdown sport, and it has always been known to sharpen your mind.
To most, chess might appear as a complex strenuous game that involves a lot of deep calculations. Design and chess appear to be poles apart on the spectrum, chess would be categorised as a left-brain activity (logical side) while design is typically a right-brain activity (creative side). Surprisingly, there exists a huge overlap between the two. Unlike the more common qualities like time management, handling pressure, leadership, accountability and ownership you gain by consistently playing any sport, here are few reasons that make chess one of the best picks for a UX designer.
Critical Thinking
As designers, ‘Design Thinking’ is a domestic term to us.
Design thinking is essentially the process designers use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions.
Critical thinking is actively analysing and understanding problem statements to arrive at the optimal solution.
An interesting article by Think Design talks about how critical thinking is a part of every stage of the Design Thinking process. Essentially, effective Design Thinking cannot take place in the absence of critical or creative thinking.
While playing chess, you’re trained to think about how a single move impacts the rest of your game. You need to anticipate your opponents response and also think about whether your pieces are improving your overall position in the game. This constant train of thought plays out for every move in the game and develops your mental strength to iteratively think out several moves ahead.
Foresight is an integral quality for a Product Designer- to predict both what will resonate with users and how the the change impacts the product as a whole. Before making any change, try to incorporate critical thinking to make better choices.
- Anticipating their moves: What will a user think while using this feature? Will they be able to transition to this new feature easily? What are the possible hurdles that users/products can face if I incorporate this feature?
- Improve Position: Does this improve the overall experience of the product? Does this add business value? Does this solve a problem? Does it help solve a short term or long term problem?
Problem Solving
Chess is essentially a strategy game where you use your critical, creative and problem solving skills to keep improving your position until you can find a win.
The design process is very similar- every problem statement that you come across will always have multiple solutions, but arriving at that optimum solution requires constant use of creative, critical and problem-solving abilities.
Chess as a sport enhances your problem-solving abilities, in every game you arrive at new scenarios with multiple solutions — the aim is to identify the best solution. Each possible move is called a candidate move and at each turn you need to identify the best solution from the list of candidate moves. As you’re constantly facing new scenarios, chess cultivates the practise of cerebration.
As a designer, the solutions may not be as obvious as in chess but you can incorporate the same principle — identify candidate solutions, iteratively eliminate choices until you’re left with the optimal solution.
Creative Thinking
Although I’ve stressed a lot on how chess is a strategic and rational game, there is a fair amount of creative thinking involved. A lot of times the best moves in a particular situation aren’t the most obvious moves and are out of the box solutions. An interesting fact about the game is that there isn’t an obvious solution, many times you’re presented with opportunities to make piece sacrifices or other unusual moves that help you gain tempo. In the example below the white sacrifices nearly all their pieces to attain a checkmate, which may not be the most obvious move.
Playing chess has helped me think of out of-the-box solutions while designing. It’s easy to run with our designer instincts, even though thinking beyond constraints could feel uneasy at first it reaps long term benefits.
Visualisation
Strong chess players have the ability to play entire games blindfolded because of their ability to visualize the board and all the pieces across the board. Since you’re constantly picturing where your opponent would move his pieces, what your responses would be in turn and how the board will look after 4–5 moves your visualization skills improve drastically. As a chess player your pattern recognition skills increase a lot as you’re constantly looking for patterns in the position to play tactics.
As a designer, visualisation is your best friend. A lot of times, you spend more time picturing the mock-ups than working on a tool. Being able to picture interfaces and solutions in your mind will not only help while designing high fidelity and low fidelity mockups but also while articulating your ideas to your product team.
Tactical & Strategical Thinking
In chess, tactic refers to a sequence of moves that limits your opponent’s moves and may result in tangible gain in the short term. Strategy on other hand is slower and the benefits of good strategical moves are more long term in nature. In simpler terms, you frequently come across two scenarios- one in which you know exactly what to do (you can checkmate your opponent, capture a piece or threaten another piece) or you simply make a waiting move or improve your position.
Both strategy and tactics can be implemented in the design process. Some of these principles can be applied as early as the user research phase and all the way up to user testing. While performing your research methods, try to incorporate questions that bring out both long term and short term pain points and solutions. Most of the times, as designers our focus is short-sighted on just the feature at hand. We fail to look at it holistically on how it would affect the users and the product in the long term. The point to remember is that the goal is to build a product that lasts for years and the solutions you propose need to be able scale with time.
You need not be a very strong chess player but the traits that you can pick up with chess can help any pawn designer promote to a queen. I hope these tips help you as a designer and that more designers get into chess. I would love your feedback and thoughts on the methods mentioned.
