Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
How can a designer ever learn how to craft solutions that work?
Solutions that work well.
A solution that’s unique to the problem and obvious in hindsight.
The advice we all get as designers is:
Go. Talk to your users.
This is an advice a good designer should never ignore. The caveat to the advice (nobody tells us this) is: Would your users ever posit the best solutions to their own problems?
By way of an example: Ask teens – what’s the best way to share their daily life journal on mobile? This is where design gets hard and inventing something new takes longer than expected. Probably the reason why our design processes turn out to be ineffectual is; is that we are told to ‘solve problems’. An obvious question is how much of our design work involves actual solutions. Probably the most dangerous thing about the statement – ‘find solutions to a problem’ is that it enables our tendency to focus on solutions; to get lost in data-driven solutions, instead of paying attention to what is going on in front of us. The focus is on finding solutions instead of defining the problem. The why what, how and endless other hard questions we need to ask ourselves and our users to understand a problem.
Learning to use a design tool isn’t hard. What’s hard is ‘learning how to think’. Learning how to find umpteen ways of looking at the problem. It takes real will and effort to understand the nuances of a problem that everybody else ignores. Snapchat, by way of an example, got to the right problem and solved it with their Stories product. The inability to tell our story to friends in a chronological (beginning, middle and end) on a continuum which happens to be the default way of storytelling. Any level of data of users sharing on a social feed would have not helped to invent stories. All it took was reframing the fundamental problem in a nuanced manner: how do humans tell stories?
On one level, I believe, designers know this already. The whole trick is keeping this in mind all the time. Perhaps then, we could design stuff. Stuff that’s new, trendy or whatever you wanna call it.
