Practical UX: Keeping a Product Diary
Inspiration often seems to be a lightning strike, a stroke of genius, or a eureka moment. The truth of it, as any designer, inventor or innovator will tell you, its a tremendous journey on either side of that moment.
How & Why To Keep a Product Diary
The “how” of keeping a product diary is pretty straight forward, so we’ll dig into that first, and then a few reasons why.
Getting Practical: Journaling The Journey
Here are few tips and ideas, in my experience this usually starts off feeling a little arduous, but once you get into the swing of it, your entries will become more concise, and flow more easily.
- Use a “no-fuss” and collaborative tool, thats easily available and easy to share. My preference is Google docs.
- If you work in a team, get others involved in your “journaling experiment”.
- Pick a regular cadence, depending on your velocity of work, it might be better to do it daily, weekly or at the end of a sprint. This is also helpful in building momentum on a project, especially if you’re working alone.
- Write as if you expect someone else to read it. The idea of a journal often involves simply writing for yourself, but when you write for others, theres a small burden to unpack your assumptions, this is critically important for the process to be effective.
- Don’t criticise or self censor your writing. Its easier said than done, but try let it flow, and don’t formalise it too much.
- Start with a structure, but don’t let it stand in your way. It can be helpful to answer a series of questions, but if you don’t have an answer, move on, no ones is scoring your journal. The structure can be as simple as “what we/I did”, “What we/I thought about it”, and “what we/I will do next”.
- Add photos, sketches, screenshots, graphs, links and any other collateral thats easy to drop in. This will bring the journal to life, and make it a far better experience to read later.
- Avoid reading previous entries every time. Its important to reflect, but separate that from your writing time, and only do it after you’ve written a few entries.
- “Time-box” yourself. By limiting the time you’re spending you can avoid it becoming a time suck, increase your focus, and decrease the amount of time you have to self censor. I’ve found ten to fifteen minutes more than ample to get down a few thoughts on the day or week.
Just Start where ever you are. Theres no perfect way to journal, and you can’t do it wrong. These are just some of the things that have worked for me, but you’ll need to allow your own process to simmer and settle. When it doesn’t work, inspect and adapt.
Telling stories
Often when presenting an idea, or solution, it can be challenging to bring others on board, without tackling the many obstacles and scenarios you may have already come across. By sharing the story of how that idea evolved, we can quickly bring others into the conversation with a clearer understanding of how we got there. This, of course, should not be a way to avoid debate, but a way align that initial point of departure.
As designers, we’re always selling an idea, and long before we can get buy-in from an end-user, we’ll need the buy-in of those around us. If we can’t sell our team, client or investor on it, how on earth will we sell it to its intended audience? Its often said that people buy the why, more than the what of a thing, and by sharing the story, the journey to “here”, we’re able to illustrate just that.
Breaking The Cycle of Habituation
Habituation is one of the most fundamental ways that we learn. When we first encounter a challenge, it might be difficult, obvious, or frustrating. Fundamentally as humans we quickly adapt, and our minds will store a pattern for overcoming it, no matter how inefficient our solution is, allowing us to create space for learning, and doing new things.
As product and UX designers, we have to be able to notice the myriad of challenges, and stack them in order to create lasting relevant solutions.
A powerful aspect of keeping a product diary for me has been self reflection, and noticing in review, where I’ve made an irrational leap in logic. The simple process itself has forced me to unpack my assumptions in a consumable way for others, and evaluate them far more objectively that I’ve been able to in the past.
Capture Ideas When They Happen & Clearing Your Head.
A lot of the motivations I’ve mentioned above are about reflection, and communication, but maybe one of the most useful benefits, is capturing ideas as they happen. More than that, having written for a week as I’ve worked through a design sprint, I found the act of intentionally ordering and capturing my thoughts actually helped to move them forward, by making the effort to summarise them and put them on “paper”, I not only felt a sense of momentum, but a sense of ‘done’ mentally that allowed me to move on.
Conclusion
The myth of overnight success obscures the circumstance, effort, failure and learning along the way, and the trappings of success once you get there in maintaining momentum. Its ultimately a state of being that requires constant effort and attention.
By Documenting the journey to, through and from these “moments of inspiration”, we can reflect on and share our processes and thinking in a meaningful way, both for ourselves and others, as well as build momentum through the process.
I found this to be an incredibly useful tool, and great way to order my own thoughts, and I hope you will too.
My name is Paul van Zyl. I’m the principal consultant at Sigma Digital, a small specialised, decentralised product design and development team. If you’re looking for a partner who can actually deliver on your next innovative project, help you and your team up your game, or just want to say hello, get in touch here: paul [at] sigmadigital.io
