Chaos Concepts: Why Designing Terrible Experiences Leads to Better Products
Stuck on a design challenge? Try making it worse.
On January 27, 1967, a fire broke out in the Apollo 1 space capsule during a preflight test. The pure oxygen environment combined with flammable materials in the original spacesuits created a deadly combination, killing all three members of the crew.
This tragedy forced NASA to completely reimagine its spacesuit design and think differently about its build approach. In the wake of the disaster, NASA adopted a new rigorous methodology known as “test to failure.” This approach intentionally pushed materials, components, and systems beyond their designed operational limits to identify weaknesses.
For the new spacesuit, engineers subjected materials to extreme conditions, including temperatures ranging from -250°F to +250°F, intense UV radiation, and vacuum chamber tests. Seams were pressurized until they burst, and joints were twisted to the breaking point. By discovering these failure points, NASA engineers could refine their designs and create systems resilient enough for the unforgiving conditions of space.
This relentless pursuit of understanding failure has become a cornerstone of NASA’s engineering philosophy and highlights an essential truth: uncovering vulnerabilities and failure points leads to stronger, more reliable design. Although the stakes are usually lower-risk than NASA’s, these same lessons are essential to user experience design.
Most design workshops focus on making things better. We gather around whiteboards with sticky notes and markers, asking, “How might we improve this?” But at Blink, we’ve discovered that deliberately breaking experiences reveals surprising insights about what makes them work.
Concept Cards: Traditional Brainstorming Yields Traditional Results
For years, we’ve been running concept card sessions. It’s one of the most potent design ideation activities in our user-centered design process at Blink. Each session starts with research insights transformed into “how might we” prompts:
“How might we help users feel more confident about their choices?”
“How might we make complex data more approachable?”
Leveraging these prompts, designers sketch rapid-fire solutions on blank card templates. The rules are simple: work fast, stay loose, no judgment. A rough drawing, a catchy title, and a one-line description. That’s it. No pixel-perfect mockups or detailed annotations are allowed. We’ve found magic in these constraints. When designers can’t rely on their usual tools and polish, their raw creativity takes over.
After each sketching round, designers share their ideas rapidly, and the group discusses the best approach. The results have been solid: user-friendly navigation concepts, simplified displays, and streamlined checkout flows — all good solutions pulled from the standard playbook of design patterns. But something was missing. Our solutions addressed the obvious problems but missed the deeper insights hiding behind users’ frustrations.
Chaos Concepts: How Bad Ideas Lead to Brilliant Solutions
Enter chaos concepts. Chaos concepts flip the concept card format on its head. Instead of asking how to make experiences better, we explore how to make them worse. Just like NASA engineers destroying spacesuits to figure out ways to make them stronger, we discovered that exploring failure points in our products led to more creative and impactful solutions.
A chaos concept session follows the same format as concept cards, but instead, we ask things like “How might we…”
- Make a smart bedroom assistant destroy any chance of peaceful sleep?
- Design a home security system that creates more anxiety than it prevents?
- Turn a neighborhood app into a source of constant social tension?
- Make group vacation planning so complex that friends never travel together again?
- Design a recipe app that makes cooking feel like decoding an ancient puzzle?
Each session generates dozens of deliberately terrible ideas: alarm clocks that require solving math problems to operate, security cameras that show footage from slightly different timelines than the present, and group vacation planning that can only be coordinated through interpretive dance. Between bursts of laughter, real insights emerge about what makes experiences truly valuable.
Why Chaos Concepts Work
Chaos concept sessions work because they pull back the curtain on our assumptions. When we try to design good experiences, we often fall back on familiar patterns without questioning why they exist. Intentionally breaking those patterns forces us to examine their underlying purpose.
Take user onboarding, for example. Traditional brainstorming generates predictable solutions — streamlined signup flows, feature tours, and polished welcome screens — all solid ideas pulled from the standard product design playbook. But these safe answers often miss deeper opportunities to serve the user.
Deliberately sketching a frustrating user experience reveals fundamental truths about what makes products trustworthy and usable. For example:
- A navigation system that randomly reorganizes itself shows why consistency builds user confidence.
- An interface that forces users through rigid, predetermined paths highlights the importance of supporting natural, non-linear exploration.
- A system that resets all personalization settings daily demonstrates why users need to make the product their own.
The genius of chaos concepts is in its ability to surface invisible requirements. Users rarely articulate needs like, “I want to customize this interface to match my workflow,” or “I need clear signals about what will happen when I click this button.“ These expectations are unspoken until we deliberately violate them.
The chaos concept process also builds empathy. Creating frustrating experiences helps designers understand pain points they might otherwise dismiss. It’s one thing to hear users find a process confusing, but it’s another to spend time actively engineering that confusion and experiencing it in real time.
The Power of Play
Beyond the practical benefits, chaos concept sessions bring joy to the design process. Designers arrive at sessions ready to push boundaries and break rules. The activity naturally encourages wild ideas and rewards creative thinking. Laughter and energy fill the room as people share increasingly absurd solutions. In a field focused on pixel-perfect mockups and rigorous a/b testing, permission to be mischievous and ridiculous creates space for creativity and new ways of thinking to flourish.
How to Run a Chaos Concepts Session
- Gather a mix of 5–8 designers and non-designers, including people outside the core project team, for fresh perspectives.
- Stock up on blank cards, thick markers, and clear wall space, or the equivalent FigJam/Miro. Be sure to post any relevant research insights that everyone can see or access.
- Transform your project goals into mischievous and chaotic prompts by asking, “How might we make this imaginably worse?” Here are a pair of recent prompts showing how to keep it specific and actionable, not overly broad:
How might we turn gen AI functionality into a source of constant anxiety and second-guessing?
How might we make experienced users feel like beginners every time they use the platform?
- Run 7–10 minute sketching rounds with quick sharing sessions between each round, encouraging people to build on each other’s terrible ideas.
- Document the awful solutions and patterns that emerge, then transform these insights into principles that guide your actual design work.
The key to a successful chaos concept session is keeping it playful while staying grounded in real user needs and problems. Like NASA’s test-to-failure approach, the goal isn’t chaos for chaos's sake. Each “bad” idea should create opportunities for meaningful impact.
Don’t wait for a perfect time. Start running chaos concepts at the very beginning of projects, perhaps even before defining a creative brief. By deliberately exploring ways to make experiences terrible, your team can uncover themes that traditional discovery might miss.
The power of chaos concepts lies in how quickly they illuminate the full scope of a problem space. When designers sketch ways to frustrate users, they quickly reveal pain points that might otherwise take weeks to surface. When they imagine features that would sink a product, they highlight what makes it valuable. Each terrible idea adds another piece to our understanding.
From Chaos to Clarity
Great product design means finding elegant solutions to complex problems. Chaos concepts offer a fresh path to those solutions by deliberately embracing chaos. Like a spacesuit tested to its limits, understanding how a digital product breaks reveals what makes it strong.
The next time you’re stuck on a design challenge, try making it worse. You’ll be surprised by how much better your solutions become.
Ben Shown is Head of Design at Blink UX, where he leads product envisioning and brand experience projects with ambitious partners, including Amazon, Cisco, Microsoft, NASA, and The New York Times. He also heads up Blink’s Boston studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a lecturer at Northeastern University, teaching design process. When given the chance, he’ll gladly talk to you about design workshops, design systems, typography, and Murphy beds.
Need a chaos concept session or UX design workshop for your product or business? Let’s talk.
