Tag Archives: process

One man’s design process can be another man’s design ‘con’cess. (See what I did there?)

Posted on by
Reply
Image credit: John Lambert Pearson, “the design process”, April 4, 2007, Flickr
via medium.com

Title: Design Process is a Myth
Context: My way or the highway does not a design process make.
Synopsis: Prescriptive design processes are like prescription shoes, sure they may fit a lot similarly sized people but they are going to make most of their feet hurt after a while. Torturous metaphors aside, the way one person designs will not necessarily work for the person sitting next to them. Figuring out the ways in which you like to solve a problem can be an incredibly, iterative, personal and prescriptive process (remember the shoes?!?!) Just because I have a series of design steps that always work for me, does not guarantee their efficacy in anyone else’s process. This is not to say that their aren’t best practices, guidelines or even universal truths when it comes to defining a common design process (i.e. don’t design while wearing another person’s prescription shoes) but knowing when to deviate from the norm is just as important as sticking to the tried-and-true when it comes to design.
Best Bit: “Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a better design process.”

Space…The final frontier…Of design…And other stuff too…

Posted on by
Reply
Image credit: Tamara Evans, “Alien spaceship”, April 13, 2012, Flickr
via umd.edu

Title: Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design
Context: You may not be designing a spaceship, but it probably often feels like you are designing something just as complex.
Synopsis: Imagine the hardest thing in the world to design. OK. Got it? WRONG! Sorry, trick question. The hardest thing to design isn’t on our world, it’s in space. Designing spacecraft is super-duper hard. Which should put your current job – you know the one that you complain about being so hard all the time – in context. Not that I want to denigrate the difficulty of designing left-handed corkscrews or apps that sort pictures of cats or even the latest design breakthrough in those little plastic things on the end of your shoelaces, but – and this is just my opinion mind you – designing a spacecraft is probably harder than all of that stuff. And with great difficulty comes tremendous disappointment and emendation and plenty of plain old wrongness. So the next time your design task has got you down, chin up. It could be worse. You could instead be designing a spaceship. Not that your job isn’t hard too…
Best Bit: “Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.”

UX design can be fun! OK. Enough fun. Now back to work.

Posted on by
Reply
via cooper.com

Title: Cooper Drawing Board
Context: This is how you do design exploration. If you have the time???
Synopsis: Deadlines. You’re probably under one right now. Hell, you’re probably facing several. Pumping out designs like a machine. Wireframing until your mouse-clicking finger bleeds. But you still find the time for design exploration right? Please put down the knife. There is no reason to get violent about this. I am just asking a simple question. So I take it to mean that no, you do not have a whole lot of free time to spend exercising your creative brain muscles? That’s a shame. Please put the knife down, I’m not being condescending. Well, if you did have the time ??? or more accurately ??? if you were given the time, here’s how I would imagine you would do it. Quick and dirty? No, more like thoughtful and crisp. Identify a problem. Design a solution. Document its story. That’s how it’s done. Enjoy these, but try and keep all sharp objects out of reach while you do. Except for pencils. They’d be ok.
Best Bit: “Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can???t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea.”

Most innovation only innovates on innovative ways of innovating uninnovating innovations.

Posted on by
Reply
Media_httpcdninnovati_ocwcf
via innovationexcellence.com

Title: When Innovation Goes Wrong
Context: 2013 is going to be the Year of Innovation! So stop doing and start innovating!
Synopsis: There is no word in the corporate lexicon more misused, misunderstood or abused than the old “innovation” chestnut. Coming up with ideas is the best part of just about any (non-sucky) job. This does not mean that every relevant workday thought is an innovation breakthrough, nor does it mean that every open question is equally deserving of a full-bore innovation task-force. When every idea ??? no matter how pedantic ??? is celebrated as a breakthrough hosanna, with no regard paid to the intrinsic value of said idea, than we have deprecated the very engine of transformative business change, reducing “innovation” to a trite extravagance. Yes, experiment! Of course, take risk! Indeed, innovate! Just do it upon a foundation of understanding, without conceit, prepared to abandon a valueless proposition as soon as it becomes self-evidentially barren. Death by innovation is a lonely road to obsolescence.
Best Bit: “Ever since innovation became the buzzword du Jour, a lot of people seem to have lost their ability to tell smart ideas from stupid ones.”

Like most everything else to come out of advertising, brainstorming is yet another pretty bad idea.

Posted on by
Reply
via youtube.com

Title: Does Brainstorming Work?
Context: No. No it does not.
Synopsis: Ah the fragile creative psyche. Gentle and soft. We must strive to protect our artistic originality at all costs lest the cruel slings and arrows of criticism damage our inspiration beyond repair for all of eternity. You don’t buy that bullshit do you? God I hope not. Creativity is not an egg that requires pampering and protection, rather it is an egg in dire need of a good cracking. It does not exist for it’s own benefit, it is but an ingredient that only finds value after some whipping and forced commingling with other thoughts – both supportive and confrontational – in order to become a useful product. So, sure, you and your co-workers could sit around floating lovely, pristine thoughts, unbesmirched by the ravages of critical examination, trading mint condition collectors items packaged in plastic and soft wadding, or, you could do something useful and push back, hardening thoughts in a forge of opprobrium and scrutiny where truly, only the strongest ideas survive.
Best Bit: “Groups that engage in…debate and dissent where they are encouraged to engage in constructive criticism, they come up with anywhere between 25-40% more ideas, and those ideas are rated as much more original.”

There is a not so fine line between designing a product people need and one that you need them to need.

Posted on by
Reply

via alistapart.com

Title: Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery
Context: He who would choose to succeed must first understand what success looks like.
Synopsis: There are many different types of complexity that designers face when working on a solution to a brand new problem. We try and manage this complexity of complexities as best we can while simultaneously attempting to crystallize a vision in our heads for where we need to wind up at the end of our process. This is our first mistake. As hard as we try, and as much as we might know better, carts and horses are awful hard to put in chronological order as ideas crash over us soaking us to the bone with brilliant potential. Complexity is rarely addressed in the first 5 minutes, and if you are convinced that it has been, know that you are within wide margins of error 100% wrong. Process is there for a reason. Discovery is the front end of process for an even better reason. You cannot design a solution without first understanding the problem no matter how guru-like and Jedi-ish your skills may be.
Best Bit: ???The Lean Startup concept of ???Minimum Viable Product??? is certainly useful, but shouldn???t we rather focus on Minimum Desirable Products????