When is design vapid and inconsequential?

Let's define what it means when we say design is not good?

1. When the users of the design say, it's not good. (Obvious? 😳)
2. When after you've explained the rationale, the audience doesn't understand.
3. When you turn in incomplete designs, not flushed out all the options, and the problem has many constraints. Your solutions are shallow and problem is beyond your skills to solve.

There's only one way to get to good design. It's to explore every combination and evaluate them.

1️⃣Short-Term Delivery

Problem: When you launch fast at the expense of innovation. Focusing on design preferences or a specific phase of the user's journey and clueless about the organization's values.

1. Implementing designs without user validation, instead bias on the development timelines and highest-paid-person-in-team opinions.
2. Develop concepts and bypass stakeholders on the project, breaking boundaries.
3. Embody lone-wolf mentality, believe you can do another's role better than the person in the role.

What to think about:

1. What are the organization's values, and why? Any metric to show its impact?
2. What does success align for you vs. the org?
3. What is this company's culture of solving this issue that's worked in the past
4. What makes your solution better than what exists?

2️⃣ Mid-Term Delivery

Problem: When you prioritize design details over benchmarking the value.

1. Implement design enhancements that are so small it's not 2x different from the original, value unknown.
2. Designing without any feedback on concepts or optimizing with a self-fulfilling prophecy. ie. Ask the user to verbalize "preference" from the choices you've provided.

What to think about:

1. More diverse feedback means better work and applying design revisions.
2. Don't rely on the user's verbal language. Consider body language, thinking, feeling, and empathy mapping.
3. What's the end-to-end user journey for the user?

3️⃣ Long-Term Delivery

Problem: You always start in the middle when you make something new, forgetting about the beginning and the end, causing disjointed experiences. ie:

1. Spending time debating over what to do in theory and never delivering anything.
2. Execution in the long term is not measurable or broken down into roadmaps

What to think about:

1. What's the growth strategy of this product?
2. Who benefits? New or existing users?
3. What is the critical outcome for the user and their value prop for trying this out?
4. What's the engagement rate of the user to come back?

Conclusion

Design is hard.