Let the designers design
Is your design project stuck? What if you don’t know where to start solving a problem? My rule of thumb: start designing. Sketch out ideas and early solutions. In this post I will discuss why letting out your inner designer is always a good idea, and why most projects should start with some design.
The story about the industrial designers
I used to work at Nokia with brilliant industrial designers who created the dominant form factors of mobile phones and thereby shaped the lives of the whole humankind. I got to observe very closely the process that designers with an education and background in applied arts use.
A typical design session with industrial designers starts with a very loose target setting, for example finding forms and shapes for a camcorder integrated within a mobile phone. Designers spread out to individual or small group work to sketch wildly lots of different ideas. After a sketching session, they have a critique: they analyse the sketches and identify the positive aspects among them: “This is really good because of X”, “This is interesting, because of Y”, or “This will work well for people that are Z”.
For me who is trained as an analytical UX practitioner this was outrageous. There was no a priori analysis of the needs of the target group, nor a good definition of the problem to be solved, or any definite criteria to evaluate the ideas against.
Then it dawned to me. This is not a question of better or worse. This is just different. These designers were identifying the criteria for good solutions, but in different order. They listed quickly the qualities X, Y, and target group Z, that were obviously not yet validated in any way, but they already created hypotheses and potential success criteria that can be validated right after. They had not been constrained by the pre-set criteria so they were free to explore within the domain without any limitations to their creativity. In addition, after the session they already had some design proposals that will respond well to those criteria, if they are proven relevant.
I simply couldn’t claim that this generative process would be any worse than my analytical one. On the contrary: theirs was so much faster than my analysis that would have required a month or two before entering the sketching phase. This insight made me think if the textbook design process is the best one after all.
Analysis paralysis
A popular approach to complex design projects is the Double Diamond introduced by British Design Council (see e.g. [1])
The first half of the Double Diamond process model is dedicated to analysing and framing the problem space. Depending on the project, this phase can take days, weeks or up to months.
Double Diamond, just like any other currently prevalent design process model, imply that the designers should hold back any desire to start designing possible solutions until the end of the analysis phase. Sometimes the projects end up in analysis paralysis: it’s difficult to know what amount of research is enough, and therefore the project dwells in analysis phase unnecessarily long.
Undeniably it is very useful that designers participate or facilitate the research and analysis so that they get the first hand feel of the problem instead of just reading the summary reports. However, this is neglecting the designer’s strongest capability: the ability to create solutions to complex problems; the ability to create something that didn’t exist before.
Current dominant process models encourage designers to hold back until the analysis is ready. Why would we want to under-utilise designers’ strongest skills in this way?
Designing too late
Let’s assume that a project has proceeded to the second phase of the Double Diamond: Develop and Deliver. This is where designers create solutions to the focused problem and design brief, which have been finalised at the end of the first diamond.
The proposed solution must be useful and desirable for the end users, it must be implementable within reasonable costs, and it must provide a business model that ensures that the investment is worth the effort for all the involved parties.
Finding the sweet spot in the intersection of these three is by no means easy. It requires tight collaboration with experts in all three areas. If you change one aspect in the solution, all the other aspects must change too.
Now, what if we end up changing one significant parameter — let’s say that we find out that there’s not enough value that we can extract from our expected target audience — and we need to re-focus and select another target group? As this was not in the original scope, we don’t have the analysis done for this target group. Looking at the process model, this is quite an oh sh*t moment: we must rewind back to the Discovery phase for some more research. This can be very costly and cause significant delays in the project.
Design early, design often
My recommendation: start a design project with design.
When a sculptor experiments with clay, the clay talks back to the artist — they are having a conversation with the material (see Goldschmidt [3]). In a similar manner, digital designers work with digital sketches in order to learn about the task at hand. You have a conversation with your material; in this case you sculpt an interactive model with digital tools on a digital canvas.
Pick up your favourite tools: pencil and notepad, Figma, Sketch, or any tool of your choice and start experimenting. When you externalise your idea, you can observe it almost like an outsider and see what’s good about it, what doesn’t work, and what are the issues that you don’t know about. The sketch talks back to you.
In just a day or two, you probably have run into most of the main questions that you need to get answers to in the discovery phase of the project.
Now you are ready to go out and do the research. You can start wide just as in the Double Diamond discovery phase, but you also have a better focus with the questions you found during sketching. Now when your research is well informed by the first sketches, you very likely avoid the “oh sh*t” moment later in the process.
In addition to primary research, you can use your sketches to elicit more relevant feedback from potential customers and users. The time with the users is a scarce resource and therefore very valuable. Use it efficiently.
And then the caveat: don’t fall in love with any of your early designs. Be prepared to ditch any or all of them when you understand the problem domain better. Work with lo-fi and very quick drafts. When you gain more understanding, do more research, sketch more refined proposals, evaluate early and often, and iterate.
In fact, there is no need for a hard cut-off for neither design nor research: research tasks should similarly continue over to the Develop and Deliver phases.
Sketches are communication tools
In addition to helping to reflect one’s own thoughts, early drafts are also excellent tools for communication within the team and with the stakeholders. It is easy for people to nod in agreement to bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, but when you show the solution from the user’s perspective, you start getting truly relevant comments. You can get to discuss the feasibility-viability-desirability triplet early in the process, thereby avoiding misunderstandings and unforeseen difficulties later.
Illustrations of the potential solutions often start to have a life of their own in the organization: they are copied over to other presentations, because they are easy to understand and they convey the story — and because they simply look nice. One illustration can end up representing the solution all over the organisation.
Illustrations are very powerful, and the designers should use this superpower of theirs wisely.
Free the designer in you
Don’t let the process models limit your inner designer. Be bold, use your designer instincts and start sketching early. That’s what designers do.
Literature
[1] Double Diamond Framework, British Design Council
[2] Rittel & Webber: Dilemmas in General Theory of Planning, 1973
[3] Goldschmidt: The Dialectics of Sketching, 1991
