How to navigate ambiguity in product design
Taking on a new challenge? Şeyda Ülgen, Senior Product Designer in Zalando’s Profiles and Personalization team, shares her tips to help you find clarity in a complex environment.
You can’t solve a problem without asking the right questions. Still, in the complex product design field, even if we are brilliant at asking questions, we often don’t have the answers right away, or the answers are not clear enough to inform our decision-making. At the beginning of a project, Product Designers are surrounded by uncertainty. It can be messy, like the start of the squiggle below, but we shouldn’t let ourselves get overwhelmed. We have to start somewhere, and a great way to start is by finding peace in the unknown. From this point, we can put on our detective hat and move forward by gathering evidence.
Read on for my insight on how to navigate ambiguity in product design. Let’s explore three points: Identifying what you do and don’t know, gathering knowledge, and making your case.
1. Identify what you do and don’t know
One who knows and knows that he knows…
His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
[…] One who doesn’t know and doesn’t know that he doesn’t know…
He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!
– Ibn Yamin
As this mind-twisting 13th-century verse humorously describes, in order to progress on our journey, it’s important to be aware of what we do and don’t know. Let’s start by identifying the types of knowns and unknowns that we can encounter as Product Designers, and what ways forward they might illuminate.
I don’t know the unknown
Start with research
A company’s likelihood to innovate depends a great deal on exploring undefined problem spaces. Being able to chart these spaces supports the strategic direction of a product and can become the foundation of a potential project.
Through generative research that focused on the beauty experience at Zalando, for example, we uncovered that customers have different motivations when investing time and money into beauty — be it to enhance a feature or for their self-care. That’s where my team, Profiles and Personalization, came in. Our focus was to use this deep understanding to help customers discover the products that are most relevant to their needs.
I know what is unknown
Test your assumptions
Imagine yourself in the product ideation phase. You have some initial assumptions about potential solutions, but you need to find out any potential issues that could arise. The next step might be to carry out evaluative research to test these ideas and understand the unknowns.
An assumption that we tested in our beauty project was that if users could narrow down the assortment, based on their skin needs, then it would make it easier for them to find the right products.
I don’t know the known
Utilize collective knowledge
Here, we believe that the information we need is out there, but we don’t have access to it yet. We can usually resolve this fairly easily by delving into collective knowledge — reaching out to our community, facilitation, co-creation, etc.
I know the known
Harness existing data
Existing information could be in the form of qualitative or quantitative data. If you have a bunch of these data points, good for you! Here are some examples of how they might look:
- Customers are overwhelmed with the huge assortment of beauty items at Zalando, and it is hard to find what is relevant to them (qualitative data from research)
- When buying beauty items online, customers can’t assess how products look and sit on their own skin — a big gap between the online and offline shopping experience (insight from user interviews)
- 55% of customers who visit skincare products click the details section, where they can see the ingredients and highlights (quantitative data from an existing analytics report)
Assess your knowledge and identify your constraints
Now, it’s time to take a step back and ask ourselves if we really need to know all the answers. To avoid wasting time, it’s helpful to be discerning about what knowledge we need before moving forward. Assess the value of the sought information, the timing, and the risks involved with not knowing.
Next, let’s think about what could block us from learning. For Product Designers who work in a fast-paced environment, for example, a very common constraint is time. In this case, it’s important to structure our concerns and talk through them with others — the more often we deliver a problem with a potential solution, the better. Here, we can try proposing another timeline, share our action plan, and explain the positive impact more time would bring.
Available resources are another common limitation for those who work in an organization without any User Researchers, set-in-product Analytics teams, or a dedicated Voice of Customers team. If you are in this situation, consider looking at unmoderated usability studies or guerrilla tests to learn more about the qualitative data you want to uncover. If there is no tracking in that particular customer journey, try to find similar patterns in a journey that is being tracked. Maybe you won’t derive any clear quantitative data, but it may support your decision-making.
Sometimes we have to make compromises due to our constraints, and that’s okay. The important thing is to make these hard decisions together with our team. This helps us to speed up the process and align on the right direction.
2. Gather knowledge
Now we understand our position much better and, together with our team, we have an idea where to start. Let’s touch on some of the different ways to gather information.
Discovery
We usually make discoveries through generative research — probably even before a team is dedicated to a project. Discovering uncharted territory can be lengthy and larger in scope compared to uncovering other types of information, but it is fundamental to shaping strategy.
Evaluation
Evaluating our options helps us to hone in on the right solution. To find clarity, putting our ideas on paper is a good start. Running an A/B test is a great way to learn more about a hypothesis. We can ask ourselves, or our team, whether this unknown has been dealt with before, and what is the best way to learn about it. Most likely, we will receive qualitative or quantitative information that will help us to make a decision.
Crowdsourcing
Feel like the knowledge is out there, but don’t have access to it yet? Crowdsourcing is a great way to move forward. Sometimes, there is nothing better than saying, “I don’t know”; being open can lead to unexpected knowledge exchange and learning opportunities. We can try reaching out to our community for guidance, facilitating a definition and discovery workshop, or participating in a co-creation session with customers. Finding the required knowledge comes down to the right strategy, communication, and collaboration.
Validation
An essential part of gathering information is validation; we should always cross-check the data we receive and ask where it came from. To further enrich our perspective, it’s great to ask the same question to different people, ideally from diverse backgrounds. One of the best ways to inform our decisions as Product Designers is by validating qualitative data with quantitative data — and vice versa.
3. Make your case
Now it’s time to make our case on the factors involved in embarking on this learning journey — be that to our team, stakeholders or management. Let’s collect our findings about what we do and don’t know, and outline the methods we plan to use to gather that knowledge, then run it all by someone from our immediate team.
Next, let’s think carefully about the audience to whom we will present our case. For example, who needs to be there, what they need, and who is the decision maker. Decide what story you want to tell and think about how you can deliver it in an engaging and digestible way. Consider what level of detail is necessary, how you will explain the reasoning behind your suggestion, and what additional questions you might receive. The following points are a useful guideline for structuring the case:
- What is the problem and where did it come from?
- Who is affected by the problem?
- Where in the customer experience is it happening?
- How did you solve this problem and what evidence did you collect?
- What is the expected outcome of the solution and the customer impact it might create?
- How are you going to measure this impact?
Feedback is golden. If your audience points out anything that you or your team didn’t consider before, try repeating the whole process until you have a high level of confidence in the solution.
Navigating ambiguity is never straightforward. We learn from each other continuously, and as we learn, our strategies and perspectives change. Customer centricity, curiosity, and openness are the keys to solving your case.
Enjoyed this article? Let me know your strategies for navigating ambiguity, or how you applied these ideas, in the comments. Want to connect? Add me on LinkedIn.
