Dealing with entropy in product design
About the necessity of steady design improvement over time
Entropy is the increase of disorder over time. Meaning that once something exists, it starts along the path of deterioration or non-existence. It sound’s grim, but when you think about it, it couldn’t be more accurate.
I want to talk about design entropy and how it affects our clients, products, and deliverables. Digital product design, in many cases, is severely impacted by entropy, considering there are often a dozen sprints that pass before we get the initial release of our product out to the world. This means; meanwhile, we are likely finding new and exciting ways to present the information. Now, this isn’t to say that your work you’ve completed is now worthless or obsolete. Your work has instead shown the opportunity for improvement.
The market for your product could change, new resources could be available, the project’s speed due to resources could be limited, hiring could be difficult or timely, and the overall needs could have changed.
The reality
In reality, there are very minimal opportunities or projects where we continuously work alongside the business team to improve the products over time. That’s just merely the cold-hard fact of the situation being a designer or developer.
In some cases, entropy can be sped up by design or development debt. Moving quickly through a sprint and publishing new work as we finish a 2-week sprint could encourage lousy practice to meet these timelines, which leads to a higher rate of entropy in that product. A sure way to do this is to properly plan out the path beforehand to reduce the debt in those scenarios.
But often, when working with larger projects or timelines, the vision could change quite substantially by the time the finished product is produced that the previous efforts require revision. Still, there simply isn’t the time or budget to address the concerns.
In a perfect world
What we need as designers and developers is the affordance of time and direction. This will allow more accurate research and planning for the future of the product.
During the initial stages of the project, you would need the opportunities to sit and brainstorm and realize the product’s future path. Brainstorming will benefit in the long run because we can listen to the research and the user surveys to imagine new functionalities or improvements required to serve our current and future user base best.
There are many products that we use on a day-to-day basis that work in this way. Companies such as Apple, Invision, Atlassian, or Figma, for example, are currently working years ahead of where they’re sitting currently with their products. They have multiple teams dedicated to improving the product now but also planning future features of their product.
But how do we delay or slow entropy?
I realize that many of us cannot have three teams of 10 designers and developers working for years at a time. It’s, for many of us, just merely unrealistic, at least right now.
What we can do right now is more substantial research. Every product or feature deserves its time in exploration and complete planning to delay degrading. By considering the following:
- Accurate user testing and personas
- Research into similar products
- Mimicking larger team processes at a modified version for your team
- Working smarter during design and development to lessen debt
Hopefully, we can develop products that have great success, which could turn into future affordability for continuous improvement.
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