Jony Ive designs a lunchbox
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From time to time, I’ll get feedback on a project along these lines:
“This feature isn’t obvious enough. It should be a big green button.”
Yes, we can make big green buttons. But what’s really our goal? A better way of thinking about it might be to say:
“This feature isn’t obvious enough. It should be more obvious.”
Designers seek to identify the best solutions to problems. Doing this effectively means considering many options. In the above examples, there’s a solution, and then there’s what solution hopes to accomplish.
Reframing as an objective moves from a specific solution to a higher level of abstraction. When we think about ways to make buttons more obvious, we have size, movement, sound, and yes, the color green. This could be abstracted further — does it need to be a button? Why does this feature need to be obvious? And so on. In other words, abstraction allows us to consider more options to a specific problem by taking a broader view.
This is especially important when starting a project, where it’s good to start blurry and gradually move toward focus. Details are loud and distract from the bigger picture. This is why a quick whiteboard sketch can be so great — it allows the big picture to come through. The idea can be judged independently of the execution. The specifics get delayed.
Is your whiteboard sketch still too specific? Try abstracting further. One of my favorite techniques is to imagine that a feature is being designed for voice commands. This forces you to think of an interaction in terms of user goals and number of steps, without worrying about green buttons just yet.
Consider how Jony Ive spoke to the importance of abstraction when asked to design a lunchbox.
“If we’re thinking of ‘lunchbox’, we’d be really careful about not having the word ‘box’ already give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow, ‘cause you think of a box as being square and like a cube.
And so we’re quite careful with the words we use, ‘cause those can sort of determine the path that you go down.”
The terms we use frame our thinking. Abstraction allows you to move away from the specific to see the big picture. The forest for the trees.
