About

Don’t take the “why” at face value. Product problems are complex. Designers should spend a good chunk of effort on evaluating assumptions of the root cause of a problem before focusing on solving it.

There’s a time for one-off solutions, and a time for more robust, elegant solutions. The perfect solution doesn’t exist, and the design process is a constant balancing of user experience, product principles and business objectives.

Design is cheap but building the wrong thing is not. Any mention of scope cutting happens after initial design exploration. Otherwise we get half-baked solutions with more holes than swiss cheese.

Never let the user see the popsicles and glue. We as a “product” (so sorry for anthropomorphizing that, yuckers) should shoulder the complexity, not our user–that’s the connective thread for any type of solution.

There will always be discomfort that we don’t know enough before we have to land on a solution. Be confident in the knowledge you do have, sprinkled with some gut instinct. The scale of the solution should be directly related to its riskiness.

Designers need to be vulnerable to be successful. Be able to bring more people into the design process which can mean losing some control and safety over how we explore solutions. And working with other designers is not enough.

The right tools and processes are less important than being critical and flexible. It’s better to ask “is this the right tool to get the answer I need right now” rather than pulling out a checklist of a linear design discovery process.

Every design presentation is a pitch. The less confident we are in that path, the more loosely held our position might be, but there should always be an opinion underpinning each stage of design exploration.