It’s a (design) trap!
We shouldn’t focus on having the right answers — it’s about asking the right questions.
It took me time and separation to understand this, but some of the best career advice I received to date was from my manager on the Windows Automotive team: “I need you to be right less of the time.”
When this line was first delivered, I will admit that a small voice inside of me thought “Ha! Proof! I AM right a lot of the time!” A bit of indignation followed… because what’s wrong with being right?
But Craig went on to explain that by leading with the “right” exploration most of the time, I was cutting off the creative process. And he was right. My recommendations were well-informed and had merit — but in the end, is there really one right way to do anything? Could I honestly say I fully understood every business requirement that might guide a decision between two options?
I can trace that approach back to my time working as a producer in video games. So much of my job was decisiveness in the moment. Even if my answers were just educated guesses, my team needed a confident vision to move forward. Even if it turned out to be the wrong guess later on.
Once I learned to stop trying so hard to be right, the next phase of my career clicked into place. Do you find yourself swimming upstream with your designs? Stuck in what feels like a creative rut? Being “right”? It’s a (design) trap.
Read on for three traps I’ve learned to avoid throughout my design career, in hopes of helping you avoid answers in pursuit of the important questions.
The Solution Trap
To overgeneralize for a moment: we, as designers, came here to be helpful. Our empathy for customers drew us to the field, but that same empathy extends to our teams. And what’s more helpful than having a solution ready to go? Especially early in career, it’s easy to fall prey to this trap: to work and work until you’ve come to THE solution.
This behavior leads to over-insulation for designer and their design alike. In order to arrive at the “right” solution BEFORE bringing it to the team, you must keep your designs private for too long. Keeping designs precious in this way tends to lead to messy, defensive critiques. Your search for a single solution is a trap.
The Solution Trap also manifests in tunnel vision: overlooking alternate solutions, ideas, or hidden requirements in a rush to get a single solution to colleagues.
In the early stages of design on any feature, resist the solution trap.
Your first job on a design engagement is to explore the space, thereby kickstarting important discussions. Over the course of my career, I have come to accept (embrace, even) the fact that early success in a collaborative environment doesn’t necessarily mean having the right answer. Instead, it generally means starting the right conversations.
What conversations can we start? Examples:
- Often, the conversations we start are about risk. If my design process identifies a risk to our customer’s experience or well being, I can call it out by including explorations that call attention to that issue — perhaps not even proposing solutions to the issue at first.
- If I anticipate there’s hidden technical costs, I can ensure my first explorations push those costs to the extreme, forcing the discussion.
- And if I’m not confident we agree on what problem we’re solving, my first “explorations” might just be a series of storyboards, to force that agreement before moving on.
Even if you don’t have major issues to explore, leaping to a conclusion often comes back to haunt the team later on. By bringing several alternatives to the table, we draw attention to the parts of the experience that can vary the most, and create opportunities for varied points of view to be heard and considered along the way.
The Scorched Earth Trap
Most designers have encountered the flow state, where we melt into our work, focused on our explorations and making further progress. At times, we can become so laser focused that we explore and discard at the speed of light, burning the territory we’ve explored as we move on to the next idea. At the end of such an exploration, we end up with a single exploration and a head full of scorched-earth ideas.
Building on the Solution Trap above, we’re not always doing our teams a favor when we prune our explorations so prematurely. Coming forward with a single highly-pruned exploration can stifle conversations and creativity.
To resist the Scorched Earth trap, I encourage designers to allow their early working files and sketchbooks to get a bit messy. When you find yourself about to obliterate some work, to delete or change an idea: why not clone the artboard and capture that idea before moving on?
By documenting your path through these breadcrumbs, you give yourself more material when it’s time to present explorations to your stakeholders. It’s possible that the explorations you might have otherwise discarded turn out to have merit down the line. An assumption you’re making could be fallacious. Or, more likely, the requirements you’re working with change along the way.
It all comes back to the questions. What silent questions are you asking yourself as you explore a design? And how can you capture those questions, rather than jumping straight to an answer?
The All or Nothing Trap
When we’re working on problems that have been solved before, it can be easy to overgeneralize. “There’s only one way to solve this problem. Let’s just do it and move on.” Or the cousin to this sentiment: “There’s nothing we can change here, so what’s the point?
But so often in design, the delight is in the details. Yes, e-commerce has been solved before, but what’s unique about your space? Are there decisions a competitor has made that you could question, unravel, explore?
When it feels like there’s not room to innovate, it’s time to zoom in. Look more closely for design pivots and opportunities. During my time on Azure Marketplace, a redesign of the tiles was not an option. But we realized that there was room to explore alternate sort and filter options, and ended up going deep exploring different frameworks and control patterns for filtering. It’s easy to think Amazon has e-commerce nailed, but there are a wide variety of situations and solutions yet to explore.
Feeling stuck? Start small. Don’t treat your design as an all-or-nothing affair. There’s room to explore, somewhere out there. And small changes can lead to big results. What small feature represents an opportunity to “mutate” the DNA of your experience? Small changes can have a big impact.
Listen to Admiral Ackbar
And now, I invoke Star Wars to enlist Admiral Ackbar onto your design team. You’re welcome.
When you find yourself trying to find the “right” answer before seeking input: it’s the Solution trap.
When you find yourself working on One True Design and discarding all alternate ideas along the way: it’s the Scorched Earth trap.
When you write off an established pattern as devoid of opportunity: it’s the All or Nothing trap.
Designers are at their best when we act as a lightning rod for questions, discussion, and opportunity. Let your questions ignite the minds on your entire product team, and your work will emerge stronger for the effort.
Cheryl Platz has worked on a variety of voice user interfaces including the Echo Look and Echo Show, Amazon’s Alexa platform, Windows Automotive, and Cortana. She is currently a Principal Designer at Microsoft, leading the C+E Admin Experience design team. As founder of design education company Ideaplatz, Cheryl is also touring worldwide with her acclaimed talks and workshops. Her next speaking appearance will be at UX London in May 2018.
