Three Questions to Ask Before You Pick Up A Pencil
How UX designers can avoid designing crap
Before the Solution
It’s so tempting when you work in product to want to get a solution out into the world. As designers, we can almost see it. We can almost taste the answer before we even start to think. People from various teams come up to us with ideas, requests, complaints… always with the solution.
30% of our work is to stop ourselves, and everyone else, in our tracks. It’s not easy to think backward and inside out. It’s even more difficult to convince others to see in this manner. But that is what we must do. This is the role of the designer. The designer must be like Merlin, living our product’s lives backward.
Before we go to the shelf to dust of a solution or a prepackaged thing, a thing that was tried and tested and proven, in order to shove into a place to fix the bad stuff, we must go through a process.
I know, I know… it sounds soo much easier to just go to your favorite website or pop open the UI kit you just downloaded, the kit that dices, slices, and mixes ready-made components for any and every recipe at a low easy payment of $15.99/month, and pluck one of those prefab solutions and force it into place. Browsing existing solutions and components is part of…
