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How to use your intuition in your product design process
Trusting your design ‘gut’ could be tricky. However, if done right, it could be a valuable resource.
The human mind is a mystery machine. It fires and wires in ways that are still enigmatic to those who study it. And among its many complex and fascinating processes, intuition is behind quite an opaque veil — with its purpose largely obscure.
Leveraging your internal data
As product designers, we strive to be methodical — gather the data, frame the problem, formulate a solution and test. And this is a reliable process. It ensures that we are systematic. It eliminates randomness that restricts us from effectively articulating our rationale to stakeholders.
But what about ideas that are not rooted in any identified problems? Hunches that tell you that users might enjoy something even though there is no apparent need? These all stem from data within you. Data that is gathered over time and experiences — your intuition.
Despite the stigma around relying on intuition in the workplace, there is support in the design community for this mode of thinking. Natasha Jen, a design partner at Pentagram, believes that design is often a messy process and out of the chaos came the solution. That it isn’t always a neat and linear process. And one that made space for intuition.
What is intuition?
Intuition is viewed as this rapid, non-conscious and unapparent thought process — a feeling or knowledge that usually is an outcome of your brain forming associations from past life events and the expertise you’ve gained. It’s useful to think of it as this ‘subjective experience associated with the use of knowledge gained through implicit learning’.
For a designer, this is what we often refer to as our ‘design sensibility’.
Where can it help?
Intuition as a thought style could be extremely useful for product designers during the initial stages of the creative process, as it can offer signals on which direction to take.
