Category: General Stuff

Disposability in design: feature not a bug

Building upon the previous post’s point about the need to “show the ugly” in design, not simply jumping to and showcasing your gorgeous Sketch mockups via templates and plug-ins…There’s another point about the value of disposability that’s worth mentioning briefly.

To be disposable in the design process is essential to the overall nature of design as a progressively iterative practice of moving from existing (meh) to preferred (yay!) with improvements upon the human condition or activity. This refers to quick pen sketches, drafty wireframes, hacked together prototypes, and even quick personas or experimental designs to see what feedback comes back. Each example speaks to how to be adaptive and improves with the tools and materials at hand, in order to create something that a) speaks to Product priorities for delivery to market and b) supports user goals and attitudes for actual usage.

Disposability is vital to reducing the cost of iterations, too, depending on how it’s built and shared. Via paper or quick smartphone photos stitched together, they afford rapidly facilitative discussions on the intent and outcomes, to ensure some kind of baseline direction with productive aims.

Disposability also ensures folks don’t fall in love with a design solution prematurely, by nature of the the rendering style (pen & paper) or the medium of the output (paper that’s torn and marked up), to ensure crucial conversations happen around the artifact itself, in service of product-driven strategies and ambitions.

That facility of easily and quickly throwing away a design keeps the team nimble, always thinking how to improve, and trying out crazy ideas. It encourages teams to be bold — after all, it’s only paper and pen or cardboard or whatever. So, yes… aim for the crazy North Star NOW and let’s discuss and get customer feedback, rather than holding things back out of fear and anxiety — which are the chief killers of innovation, and of memorable designs that enable customers to enjoy your brand, your product, your service within their lives.

Showing the ugly in design

Perhaps due to the ease & proliferation of Sketch templates for creating high-res mockups that look production-ready — dashboards to admin consoles to social feeds — there seems to be a strong bent towards going all realistic and photo-ready from the start of a project.

Please don’t do that.

I mean sure, why not make it look beautiful and well-formed, as if it’s already coded — indeed, modern tools make it so quick (time saving) and easy (just a few copy/paste/edit maneuvers). It seems to be a no-brainer, right? PMs, Devs, clients will love it — makes you look so awesome too. Capable of spitting out something that looks perfectly formed. Maybe so, but here’s something that’s lost — seeing the ugly, the disposability of doing rough pen/paper or whiteboard-based sketches that’s lower cost and reduce a team’s irresistible attachment to a finished-looking mockup. It also encourages the team to get involved in all the ugly iterations, the “wrong ones”, the “bad ones”, the “WTF are you thinking” ones…so everyone can understand/learn why they’re not good, how considerations or issues become clearer after subsequent attempts.

Creating a good design is not simply about spitting out that perfect gorgeous mockup for Devs to code up.

It’s more effectively about that elusive journey of exploration, discovery and understanding (or learning), an emergent revelation of what’s important (and conversely, not important), via a series of progressively iterative, increasingly higher fidelity creations that…

a) reveal levels of complexity and relationships among objects & actions — which non-design peers likely never knew or realized [spoiler: they’re often buried in tedious 100 page docs nobody reads, or across dozens of JIRA tickets in dozens of browser tabs]

and

b) getting non-design peers to participate on that journey, helping them recognize what’s important, and how design really happens, aside from pop cultural notions It helps (re)set expectations and disabuse others of false notions per media hype (the “magical genius designer with unicorn rainbows shooting from finger tips” — NOPE!).

It reveals the reality of design as a messy, ugly process of fits and starts, of zig zags and reversing course, of throwing away ideas quickly to make faster progress, of making (gasp) mistakes with a basket of crumpled stickies. It’s admittedly exposing the truth of the process, the essence of creation to those who likely are terrified of seeing the mess, the ugly before the beauty. After all, it just looks so risky and uncertain. Who wants that?? They have to guarantee 32.43% increase in revenue growth next quarter!!

But if you want to earn a team’s trust, and cultivate non-design peers as veritable partners in an ongoing process of generating & delivering long-term value (to customers and your own internal organization), then showing the ugly while holding their hand (metaphorically, of course), is so damn useful, and yes, so damn painful. By going through the visibility and honesty of traversing the ugly together, the collaboration is healthier, stronger, and has the caliber to withstand truly tough arguments when it comes to time to ship and make extremely hard trade-offs.

Showing the ugly helps.

Designer as interpreter & therapist

One essential truth of being a designer that I’ve realized over the past 15+ years of practice — with startups, large corps, and agencies — is that it’s not really about the the design itself. Of course, you are totally expected to deliver a well-crafted, thoroughly thought-out, and deeply empathetic or contextualized solution that speaks to business goals (i.e., metrics and OKRs). That’s simply a given, in terms of the deliverables and outcomes produced.

That’s the job.

But the implicit — and I’d argue greater — value of a human-centered designer on a cross-functional durable team is how that professional is striving to deliver against a deeply personal aspiration, which involves constant, patient, alert-in-the-moment collaboration with non-design peers — Engineers, Product Managers, Sales, Marketing, Support, etc.

Those collaborations inevitably involve sensitive, perplexing, and outright fraught conversations— i.e., conflict! Ugh.

But this is where the designer serves a profound complementary role. Not as some 11th hour savior with a “magical solution” (umm, that’s a fun myth) but instead as (a) an interpreter of various projected perspectives (borne out of organizational or personal agendas) and deeply felt values or beliefs (i.e., a “point of view”) via aptly communicative forms (sketches, diagrams, prototypes) for iterative deliberation of latent assumptions…and also as (b) a therapist (!) facilitating volatile dialogues that expose animosities, misunderstandings, contradicting beliefs, even bad (read: “counterproductive”) approaches per years of misguided habits.

The point in this case is deeply listening to the grievances exposed, while enabling the teammates to reflect a little bit themselves in a hospitable manner. Often they just need to air it all out in a group session, away from emails and Slack channels! Yes, it’s indeed a therapeutic activity, helping them see a better way, coaxing them along a messy journey, assuring them things will indeed work out (i.e., their goals will be achieved…if they work together for shared aims!) …And the designer can/should support them towards cultivating team trust or rapport, optimism and hope for a better way, and belief in the value of a humanistic approach that everyone can benefit.

The designer’s power

Over a late afternoon coffee, a fellow designer asked me “how can we have power as designers” — in the context of “those big decisions” being made by non-design leaders in an organization. Well, it’s a common question and I address it the following way, by sussing out the nuances of power, authority, and influence.

 

First of all — All designers have power. Our power comes from our ability to decode complexity & ambiguity, translate and interpret those issues, visualize (or somehow give form) them and stage productive dialogues that guide everyone towards an optimal solution that benefits the maximum set of overlapping concerns, as oriented towards the customer. That power is guided by an optimistic spirit of iteration and risk-taking and learning. That is our power and how we make use of that power is up to each of us. The question is whether that power has veritable impact for the causes we believe in — towards improving the human condition given various contexts.

 

But when I hear “why don’t designers have power”, what I really hear is “why don’t we have the authority” to make certain decisions (like stop an ugly and harmful interface going to market). Authority is contingent upon a variety of factors, given the organization — often dependent upon the power structure as codified by levels, titles, incentive models. Cultural factors apply too — is it a very hierarchical place or more egalitarian, large corp vs small startup, agency working a client, etc. But authority can also be developed via relationships with key figures in an organization and applying (consensually, of course) models of accountability like DACI / RASCI to clarify who “make the call” versus “who is contributing input”. Having been in multiple various corp design departments, I totally get the value of having a champion advocate for design at executive levels, truly empowered / authorized to make crucial “big decisions”, which is great for matters around culture, process, strategy, and especially vision-setting. But maybe not so much for why your PM didn’t like your dropdown menu design 😉 (unless it’s a massive systemwide UI component that will screw up core customer flows thus causing major support call headaches, etc.).

 

However, not all organizations or teams have the role of a Head of UX or similar, sadly. Or the issues being battled over are a bit too granular to bother the VP of Design (one should play that card carefully and use it in where it really matters — a whole other topic around assessing goals / risks / asks / benefits ). So what’s left is influence. This goes back to your power as a designer to shape and influence decisions by virtue of your talents around discovery, interpretation, visualization, and iteration — backed by compelling stories and rationale that speak to the goals of solving for customer problems.

 

Influence emerges through the designer’s ability to apply their power given a particular context, to achieve certain aims. It involves relationship-building, trust-building, active listening, humility and grace, with a touch of charisma, all backed by showing outputs and outcomes. Waging influence is an art, developed over time and with lots of practice, but it is essential to be an effective designer (and leader) who operates as a true partner with non-design stakeholders serving the needs of the customer & business overall.

 

Thrown into the mess…

I always say there is no perfect design. Likewise, there is no perfect design situation. You are always thrown into a mess of communications and deliveries. This is not meant to be a judgment — it’s simply inherent to being a designer. There is a “thrown-ness” to it, if you will.

 

Of course, we are taught the “right way” or “proper set up” of a design engagement in university classes — like how every engagement should have a specific set of people representing core disciplines (product, engineering, customer support, sales, etc.) with clarity on the problems, timelines, milestones, review criteria, and so forth. And there’s often some handy document like a “Design Brief” to set the aims, corral alignment, provide the structure and focus to said engagement, compartmentalizing all the key information pieces (requirements, goals, etc.) into a collectively shared manner. And voila, right? Umm, not quite…

 

While it’s super valuable to learn that method of the “design brief’ and such, the reality is always messier. You are thrown into a situation not of your own making, with people and process and outputs already happening in some ways, things are truly “in-flight” with pre-set targets and such, that you must inherit and absorb, or somehow work with. There is a melange of personalities, politics and power structures, communications and deliverables, cross-functional / inter-departmental dependencies…oh, and by the way, there’s the actual product or services, and of course – the customers! All of these elements are simply happening in their own way, against their own rhythms, or due to forces already set in motion before your arrival upon the scene. So, good luck right?

 

Well, the challenge for any designer is the “sensemaking” of such complexity and ambiguity, while entering the stream of workflows in progress, AND ALSO carve out that precious vital space for the “design intervention”  to transpire — beyond simply specs and assets, which is often the first ask by unknowing non-design peers, sadly.

 

A good way to navigate that sensemaking journey is to ask the following:

 

  • What are the basic assumptions of this project or problem (or overall situation): Truly unpacking what is in everyone’s heads via personal 1-1 and collective discussions grounded in some common artifact (focus-goal map, difficulty vs priority matrix, even customer videos…and of course, that design brief) Maybe there’s some executive drivers presumed as irrevocable core beliefs ingrained into the team’s charter, if not the individuals’ psyches.

 

  • What are the critical dependencies for achieving design impacts: Other people, other products, other services, things often hidden in the corporate woodwork or simply taken to be intuitively known by the product team members (especially those who have been working on it for years). How do those dependencies impact timelines and handoffs? Where are the known frictions and potential roadblocks? Who can help resolve them? And of course, the accountabilities and incentives — very crucial in product development programs. This stuff often lives in a kind of ambiguous ether that permeates a team and overall program. But folks don’t realize it! So you gotta dig into it.

 

  • What are everyone’s expectations of your role as a designer, and of design itself? Really get clarity on this, as often this is the rub for many designers thrown into a situation where things are so dysfunctional, because there’s a lack of clarity of roles and owners and leaders. Who is accountable for what and by what measures (or incentives). And then, truly push back on “specs/assets ASAP” for a sprint starting tomorrow — that’s clearly yet another sign of the mess to be re-organized into a more effective model, hopefully by virtue of your “design intervention”.

 

It can undoubtedly be discouraging and downright frustrating to arrive upon a promising situation  (or sold as such) only to realize things are not as neat or tidy as we would wish it to be. Indeed most are frankly total clusters!@$%  :- / Sigh. It is what it is, right?

 

However, if we look upon the untangling of the inherent “thrown-ness” of all design situations as a pragmatic puzzle of decoding complexity and grounding ambiguity, whereby you the designer are leading conversations to enable such clarity — it can be valuable learning, and even a fun challenge, for everyone, where all feel as if they are participating in the clarifying process. So, leverage your abilities as a designer to uncover and intervene effectively. It’s a huge opportunity for you to set yourself up as a design leader as well, role modeling “good behavior”. Because, there is no perfect design situation.