Recap & Thoughts on “Evolving the Design Game” by Ross Popoff-Walker
On February 21st, I was delighted to represent Lifion as the venue sponsor for the Digital Product Design meet-up at Lifion NYC. The presenter, Ross Popoff-Walker, gave a great talk covering the history of design thinking, the essential nature of design in our daily lives, the importance of design practices and the need to take ownership of design and evolve beyond “pixel-pushing.”
Design is frequently, and unfortunately, considered the “make it pretty” part of products and interfaces. However, Ross examined some key historical moments where poor design actually resulted in loss of life and other terrible outcomes. One in particular was the NASA Challenger disaster, which is partially attributed to a very poorly designed report of the shuttle’s rockets’ O-ring operation at low temperatures. Those O-rings were the essential piece that failed and caused the shuttle’s explosion and loss of 7 astronauts’ lives. An analysis of that report found that the NASA folks didn’t understand the data within it, due to the presentation being so hard to understand clearly.
While most of us are not designing NASA rocket engine reports, the intention should still hold true. We are building products that intake, transform and surface information to our end users. The interactions could be frustrating for people, cause confusion, it could cause them distress & a feeling of dread when doing even simple tasks or potentially impact their well-being directly.
At Lifion we are building software which deals with essential information and life choices for employees. Our software can make people’s live easier and better, or impact them tragically. Imagine a new parent who doesn’t have the medical coverage they expected because the UI for their health benefits was hard to use and understand. The emotional distress this could cause in such a critical time of their newborn’s life could ruin a beautiful time and memory. And worse, they could be put at financial risk if the benefits didn’t cover this very basic need.
If we put design and design thinking at the forefront of what we do, we stand to delight our people and potentially make their lives better and happier — yes, even by making something like benefits selection or vacation time-off configuration easy to navigate and action.
If you’re curious about design thinking, please check out IDEO’s info and courses as they are a sort of pioneer at popularizing this process — http://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking
