How to escape the vacuum and create work that matters

Designers obsess over details, that’s what we do. In fact, we’re so good at it, that often times we would lose sight of the bigger picture — And that is how beautiful, pixel-perfect interfaces that are not serving either the business or its users, are created.

It sucks, because we care (a lot), we stress over our projects and carry them around with us all day, way after we left the office.

So how can we make sure we don’t get sucked into the coziness of Photoshop, but instead, create remarkable work that’s also important? It’s simple* really…. We create clear goals.

*A disclaimer: Simple, is F**king hard.

What Don’t I Know

Start by creating a “ToKnow” list. Sit your team down (You can also do this solo) and brainstorm to find what you don’t know about your product.

Try exploring the relationship between the app and the business needs, or the app and your user’s behavior to find the questions you will answer later on. Like everything design, the simpler it is, the more effective it will be.

Like everything design, the simpler it is, the more effective it will be.

Examples

Q: How to word best what it is that we offer our users?
Q: Will users be able to figure out how to find {{Action A}}?
Q: Why aren’t users doing {{Action B}}?

Tips

• Brainstorm with other people.
• Try explaining your idea to people outside the team, this is surprisingly effective.
• I like framing these as short questions, but I urge you to experiment with different formats.
• I recommend Evernote for collecting these. I go back to the older lists every once in a while to check up on what had changed, and the app makes it easy.
• Try to make a habit of coming up with 1 question every day by pairing it to a daily activity like your morning coffee.
• Avoid pairing the solution to the question and locking yourself into a possible solution before exploring different ones (“How will users contact us?” is much more effective than “How should the contact form look?” as it leaves room for exploration).

I know how hard this is — All you want to do is to make progress, and all I’m asking you to do is to slow down. The thing is, there’s a vast difference between doing something and making progress.

There’s a vast difference between doing something and making progress.

Do this now

What are you working on now? Come up with one question and write it down on a piece of paper.

How To Find The Answer

Now that we have a set of questions, it’s time to pull from our experience and knowledge to find which exercises will answer them.

Examples

Q: How to word best what it is that we offer our users?
A: Run an Adwords campaign, and A/B test different messages to check which resonates the most.

Q: Will users be able to figure out how to find {{Action A}}?
A: Build a clickable prototype and test with 5 random people.

Q: Why aren’t users doing {{Action B}}?
A: Schedule a remote usability test with to see how users use {{Action B}}.

Tips

• Come up with several possible experiments for any single question.
• There’s no need to get too creative, chances are someone has already answered the question you’re asking, in a different context. See how other companies did it before.
• Every once in a while, look back at the solution you paired with a specific question. Would you choose the same method today? This is a great way to put to practice all the great techniques we all read about on other blogs.

Do this now

Take the question you just wrote and try to find 3 different experiments that will help you answer it.

Doing It

Time to execute! I don’t want to go into any specific method (Usability Testing, Prototyping etc…), but if you have any questions, I’d love to help! So please reach out @NirBenita.

It’s easy to get sucked back into Performance Mode, sometimes, it’s even necessary, but if we want to create work that matters, we simply cannot afford to ever lose sight of the bigger picture.

Thanks for making it this far! I’d love to hear what you think