I listen, ask questions and gather as much information as I can about the problem, its people and its context. I draw diagrams and sketches for myself, jot down notes, quotes or ideas, and ask more questions, until I think I've built a fairly comprehensive understanding of the problem.
Then I stare at it all. Maybe I'll do more sketching, diagramming and scratching of the head.
Of course design is about sharing and getting feedback. But you need something to get feedback on, so at some uncomfortable point, the rubber hits the road and you need to make something.
I forced myself to consider what actually goes on in my head during these quiet periods of reflecting, analysing, processing and re-shaping that lead to making.
This is what I came up with.
It is simply a list of concepts - the application of which is common, I think, to all the projects I work on. The list is presented here in the order the concepts came to me. I've made no attempt to organise or prioritise them. I may do that in a different reflection.
Repetition
When you spot repetition, warning bells should ring. Whether it's repeated steps in a flow, repeated titles or phrases in a piece of content, questions or inputs in a form, the chances are the flow has gone wrong somewhere. Repetition weakens understanding and creates extra work. Try to remove it.
Ambiguity
Ambiguity is amazingly common - not just in what has been published or written previously, but in what is said during meetings. Ambiguity frequently covers (or hides?) incomplete thinking. Being precise helps you understand what needs to be changed or made, and helps the user too. We're so used to hearing ambiguous assertions or comments that our brains allow them to wash over us. Becoming alert to those moments, and jumping in to help disambiguate thinking and arrive at clear, shared understanding, is a key part of the job.
Hierarchy
What thing comes first? And what things are its children, or siblings. How about its parents? When it tries to understand things, the human brain likes to move from a synoptic view (an overview) to a detailed view. That overview is needed for context - an anchor, a familiar view - to which new information can be added. Organising things to feel comfortable in this hierarchy of understanding is what a lot of my sketching is about, whether plotting the phases of a multi-channel service, or organising the detailed steps of a particular interaction sequence.
Recursion
If you're designing workflow-based, enterprise applications, you will encounter recursion: a user need to complete the same task multiple times for different objects (like setting up multiple branches of a bank, for instance). Find ways to handle recursion gracefully and without forcing repetition upon the user, and you will be doing your client and their customers/users a great favour.
Grouping
It sounds simple. But some things belong naturally to other things, and will feel odd if placed incorrectly with non-similar objects. Over time, in companies, groups can become disordered for a multiplicity of reasons. Simply re-grouping things and playing the new families back to stakeholders frequently leads to those 'of course!' and 'why didn't we do that before?' type of comment.
Parallelism
Treating similar tasks or flows in similar ways creates feelings of harmony and speeds understanding and completion of tasks. Like most of these concepts, it applies at the structural level as well as on the surface.
Escape routes
Pulling users through a journey as they accomplish their tasks is one thing, and relatively straightforward. But what about helping people escape (or recover) when they realise they've gone wrong, or came to the wrong place?
Learning
People want things to be easy, so how can you present your product or service in a way that makes it easy to 'learn', ideally with no actual learning involved? And if there are new or novel tasks that will need to be learned, how can they be made self-descriptive so that the user can learn them almost without being aware of it? New, fresh interactions can feel completely intuitive or the total opposite.
Abstraction
In the example of a meeting with subject matter experts and/or stakeholders, perhaps from a variety of different business groups, it can be that conversation gets hung up on low-level details. Everyone bases their comments on what they know (and may have known for years) and lose sight of why things are done, or the broader context of those things. Abstracting from the particular back to the general, and in turn creating something that is transferable (especially if that can be done on-the-fly in meetings) can help drive useful project insight.
Synthesis
Combining, everything into a clear, cohesive and attractive whole. A lot of emphasis is placed on synthesising things in a new, innovative or transformative way. But really, innovation happens in, or emerges from, countless other steps or phases. Synthesis is really just the pulling-together of all the thinking in as clear and concise a way as possible.
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