My Most Important Design Tool
What I use the most throughout my design process.
I almost titled this bit of writing as THE most important design tool but I didn’t think that was fair to other designers and other design processes. I write this disclaimer because I respect the idea that different designers will have different approaches to their craft and as a result will have different tools they deem important or vital to their process.
My process is centered around the following:
Identifying root problems within a service or experience that design can help solve.
Understanding humans who interact with the services and experiences that I help design.
Refining design solutions through feedback and testing.
With these pillars in mind there is one tool that acts as a catalyst for each: Questions.
Being able to comfortably ask questions that will lead to the necessary insights is what I look to do the most within my process. Asking great questions and being a question oriented designer is something that takes skill and practice. These are things that I work on every day. Here are some questions I like to ask, I hope that you can share with me or anyone else reading this what questions you like to ask so we can all learn and grow together.
Identifying Problems:
Why are we doing this?
Why do you want (insert design solution here)?
How do you think this design solution will impact the state of the business/organization?
What are some business goals attached to this project?
What has stopped you from doing this before?
Some of these questions are designed to help stakeholders shift away from the solution to the problem. It’s important for me to do this because understanding the problem is vital to prescribing the right solution. We all have a human instinct to focus on the solution, that is more fun and exciting to do. But questions like this help mitigate that instinct.
Design Research (Understanding humans):
Who are we doing this for and why?
What problem are we trying to solve for our customer/user?
How do customers/users currently try to solve this problem?
What do customers/users expect from our current service or experience?
How does our service/experience fit into the lives of our customer/user?
These again are high level stakeholder focused questions. Naturally questions are the heart of proper design research and research specific questions can be (and probably will be) a separate article in itself. The goal of these questions are to help bring the user/customer into the solution equation. It is completely natural and understandable for stakeholders to focus primarily on the business outcomes. It’s your job to help them factor in the human impact and outcomes.
Design Solutions:
Did we get closer to solving the problem or do we think we solved the problem completely?
How can this be better?
Is this a DVF solution? (desirable, viable, feasible)
Is this an ethical solution? Will this solution cause harm to humans in some way?
Can this solution create more problems for us now or down the road?
These are another set of stakeholder specific questions. They are generally designed to help tie the solutions we create back to the problem we discovered. More importantly (and now more than ever) it is vital that we make sure we are creating an ethical design solution that won’t negatively impact humanity. We also don’t want our solution to create new problems for the organization.
As I stated earlier in this article, these questions merely just scratch the surface and are primarily focused on the guiding the stakeholder through my design process which tends to focus more on the beginning of a more holistic design execution process. There are many more questions that need to be asked throughout a strong design process and I have left several of them out.
However to get started at being great at asking questions simply start with the most important one:
Why?
Why will almost always lead to other questions and a deeper understanding of the problem space of which you need to work within. Why also helps everyone involved with a project avoid doing things or coming up with solutions for the wrong reasons (i.e. Why are we doing this?)
So start there, start with asking why at the beginning of every project you work on. It might make some folks uncomfortable to do so but in the long run it will lead to better solutions.
Related News:
Open AI released Chat GPT-4 today. I would argue that the art of asking questions will be vital in how we interact with AI now and in the future.
What I’m Reading:
Design for the Real World. I feel a little late to the party here but this book creates a great foundation on how to think about the way design is impacts the world.
Quote I’m Pondering:
“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”
Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in Economics
Youtube Video of the Week:
Empathy was a very close runner up in most important design tool and Michael Ventura speaks eloquently on the topic here.
One Last Thing:
John Maeda released his annual design in tech report as part of SXSW. My one sentence takeaway is that it’s more important than ever to think about design beyond the pixel level.