Design exploration is never a waste of time
Take any House M.D. episode: a patient has been assigned to Dr House because the other doctors fell short at healing them. Almost every time, House and his crew write all the symptoms on a whiteboard and make hypotheses on the reasons of the patient’s illness. Then, they run multiple tests to find out if their assumptions were right. Eventually, once they’ve identified the disease (spoiler: it’s never lupus), they define a cure and everybody’s fine.
The approach described in the TV show to identify a patient’s disease looks a lot like the design thinking process: gather everything we know about the problem we’re trying to solve, make hypotheses and run tests to confirm or contest them. When you’re facing complex problems like House does, you can’t expect your first idea to be the right solution. You have to explore many approaches in order to increase your chances of success. Just like in design.
One of the most common questions in the industry concerns the definition of the different design roles. Almost every time I ask someone about this, I get a different answer. For my part, I think I’d go with the following definitions:
UI designer: creates usable interfaces
UX designer: imagines flows that make sense
Product designer: finds solutions to people’s problems
And that’s because they’re always facing an infinity of different options (of interfaces, flows or solutions) that designers usually spend a lot of time exploring. People tend to be surprised by how long it took for a designer to come up with such an obvious and well-crafted solution and don’t imagine how much work there is behind the curtain.
If you have literally tried every possible variation, you will have come across the best solution.
— Julie Zhuo, VP Product Design @Facebook
This exploration phase is called ideation in the design thinking process, develop in the double diamond process. It looks a bit like a brute-force approach (similar to hackers cracking your password by spamming the login page with every single combination). It’s possible to explore at different phases of a project, from the most abstract idea, to the tiny details of your final interface:
Aligned with our 3 design definitions it goes like this:
OK, in reality, product designers are usually responsible for all the facets of a project (solution+flow+UI).
I’d like to think that one of the product designer’s role is to save the developers’ time. They’re able to do this because they’re gonna generate lots of ideas that they’ll be able to test on their own very fast. That’s the reason why Design Sprint has become a very popular technique in tech startups. Design can help to get answers to critical questions in a very time-efficient manner.
Implementing one of those ideas just to see if it’s going to work or not would be expensive: you’d have to involve back-end and front-end engineers (web or mobile), product managers, QA testers, deployment, mobile release management… You just can’t go through this entire process each time you want to test a new idea (which can be a dozen of variations on some projects). Using modern prototyping tools is way faster: once you have your screens, you can create interactions between them in minutes and put this in the hands of real people in hours rather than days.
Regarding that part, some businesses are luckier than others: designers who work on a subject in which a lot of people will relate can rely on guerrilla testing techniques. This is the case for ride-sharing: you can go to any bar or any coffee shop in a big city and find people who use that kind of service. It’s not true if you’re a startup helping people to get a loan, you’ll have to define a segment of users you want to interview, find where you can get in touch with them, call them to make appointments, ask them to come in your office… This whole process is very time-consuming. We rely a lot on those guerrilla techniques at Heetch because we find more value in the frequency with which we meet people to show them our prototypes rather than in having the exact user segment for each project. That way, we’re able to test an idea, get results, iterate and test it again several times a week, increasing the number of ideas we can test in a short period of time.
Think ideation is a waste of time? Try making mistakes.
It’s easy and tempting to surrender and accept statements like “we don’t have time for that, let’s just implement whatever our first idea is”.
When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.
— Steve Jobs, an humble entrepreneur who had a few good ideas in the past.
Sometimes you’ll find a solution that works on your first try but you’ll never know if you could’ve done better by putting a little extra effort during your discovery phase. Some other times, you’ll implement your first idea because you thought you couldn’t afford to spend too much time on design and it’ll be a total bust. Here’s the obvious takeaway of the article: the more time you spend searching for a good solution, the more you increase your chances of success. However, at some point, it isn’t worth it anymore to keep trying new ideas, hoping to find a better one, because you’ll have covered most of the solution space. There’s a notion in economics for that: we’re talking about the point of diminishing returns,
At Heetch, we don’t separate design roles. Each of us owns every design aspect of their projects: research, ideation, UI design, UX writing, prototyping, delivery… That’s why we try to hire people with good skills in every discipline (and possibly with one strong speciality to help us progress in this field). We also need to find people who aren’t in love with their design and who will understand that 90% of their work will never be pushed in production. Not because their explorations have no value, but because they are paths that their tech team shouldn’t follow. Instead of that, we try to find people who are obsessed with the problem they are trying to solve and who are more excited by increasing metrics on a released feature rather than just pushing pixels in Figma.
See yourself in this “fast prototyping and testing” mindset?
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