Design Artifacts for Learning: what you make shapes the things you are able to learn

Artifacts of design

At a startup, I get to work on a variety of areas and angles of a product in the broadest sense — from core definition to very specific interface design — to support our business. Each part of this continuum may call for a different approach to help focus our learning. Still, it is so very easy to slip into a routine or roll with a design method without more carefully considering what kinds of design artifacts I am creating and how those change my ability to learn and iterate. This should be obvious, but I, like so many others, can easily get into my own approach and forget to look at things a little sideways. We’re designers, right?! Seeing things in a new or novel way is one of the unique and essential values we bring to an organization. And not just because you have this perspective, but because you have the ability to make way for others to see things sideways as well.

Take this oversimplified framework as one way you could use to work through a design problem.

1. Start by considering what you already know about a problem space and identify the things you don’t know.
2. Next, consider the context of the implementation — are there existing patterns or similarities that exist that can add to what you already know or don’t know.
3. Decide how to best learn the things you don’t know and then go learn them.

When you’re clear on what it is you need to learn, then it’s easier to decide what’s worth doing, what artifacts will help you the most in making the unknown, known. Alternatively, you can look at this and consider the things you might be missing out on as a result of the method(s) you are already using. Perhaps you’ve been getting one type of feedback about a design, but are really looking for something else. Changing your artifact may be faster and more effective than trying to extract what you need with the wrong artifact.

I borrowed this framework from Indi Young’s Mental Models and did a little repurposing to show how tactical, software design artifacts connect to the process of learning and knowing. Carefully define what you are trying to learn and align it with a method that will actually help you learn it.

For example, if you are trying to learn how your users will understand your product’s information organization, a full visual design will often prevent you from easily getting that kind of input. You’ll be learning all sorts of things about what color people want to see or exactly which kind of control they expect. But if your goal is to understand how you could best structure your product to fit in their world, this isn’t the most direct approach. People are rarely able to see beyond the layer of design you are showing them.

All this to say, pick the method, fidelity, and design artifact that helps you learn what you need to know in an effective way. When evaluating your designs with users and stakeholders, it’s important to remember that you will be limited in what you can learn based on the artifact you are presenting.

Artifacts get a bad rap for being busy work or a simply a blocker to shipping something. But you’re going to make something tangible anyway. So, in recognition of more haste leads to less speed, select the artifacts you create with the intent to learn with precision.

At the pace of change in a startup with complex systems, you won’t often get a chance to solve a problem twice; change is happening too fast, you’ll be too busy, and there really isn’t enough time. That doesn’t mean you won’t iterate, but it does mean that some decisions are difficult or costly to reverse — one-way doors, as they say. Designers should take care to fill their jars with the big rocks first by ensuring sure you know exactly what you need to learn and then select a technique that enables you to answer those questions quickly.

At Convoy, product designers get the freedom to work both on the definition of the space we are working in (what problems to go solve) as well as the agency to solve them in the way we see fit (our artifacts and solutions). That means this is a question that should be carefully considered each time a problem, product initiative, or learning opportunity comes along.