Introduction

People don’t always do what they say, or what you think they do.

We’re all a bundle of contradictions, works in progress. As the saying goes “pay attention to what people do, not what they say”. Our actions and feedback is not often aligned, and this unpredictability forms the basis for a human centred design approach to problem solving. We must design for how people behave, not for how we wish they behaved. Products built upon empathetic insights about human behaviour, always find a place in the lives of people whose needs are being served.

As an early stage startup with all gears moving toward fund raising, it can feel like a distraction to engage in design thinking. With software it’s clear: when you don’t have programmers, you don’t get a computer program. But when a team develops a product without designers, a design gets made nonetheless — accidental, bad design, most likely.

And what is the cost of bad design?

Good design isn’t the outcome of picking up a tiny issue and creating a solution for it. It’s arrived at by gaining deep understanding for the problems people have, the context in which they use products and testing solutions with people. It’s labor-intensive and requires people who are engaged with their users over long periods of time.

But if you think good design is expensive, let’s look at the cost of bad design — it is everywhere, and it costs us. Sometimes it’s about bad design research and working off biased insights, that can cost the company down the road; and sometimes it can be decisions based on intuition, implemented in the product. If you’ve ever felt stupid using an ATM machine, or spent time filling out a form to only learn that it can’t be submitted — with no indication as to what did you do wrong — that’s bad design.

This video speaks in depth about five social innovations that failed in their implementation. Cautionary stories about trying to solve problems ‘for’ people, instead of ‘with’ them. A good reminder that you are not your user (one of the core principles of digital designs discussed in a later chapter) and reason to invest in systems thinking using a human-centred approach.

Companies that prioritise design embed it as a core component of strategy, culture, and process. They recognise that design is not just about aesthetics, but a strategic tool that can drive innovation, and can create a competitive advantage. When done right, design is an investment in the company and keeps the business congruent and centred around the user.

How do you define design?

Before the industrial revolution, designing was often ‘unselfconscious’, an integral part of making. As planning became separated from making, designing became more ‘self conscious’.

The understanding of design at scale, has changed over time. While it used to be conflated with applied arts and craftsmanship before the invention of the printing press, it found a place in ergonomics during the industrial age, and has come to be something of behavioural science in the information age. The growing need for graphical user interfaces, has fuelled the rise of design as a distinct discipline in the tech market, with specialisations within design sprouting by the day.

When we talk specifically about digital product design, this excerpt by Kevin Slavin, from the Journal of Design and Science, is one way to ground our thinking —

The user made perfect sense in the context in which it was originally defined: Human-Computer Interaction. User-centred Design emphasised the practical and experiential aspects of the person at the keyboard, as opposed to the complex code and engineering behind it. But we are no longer just using computers. We are using computers to use the world. The obscured and complex code and engineering now engages with people, resources, civics, communities and ecosystems. Should designers continue to privilege users above all others in the system? What would it mean to design for participants instead?

The Elements of Product Design as illustrated by Jamie Mill

At its core, Amber Case argues in this article, that design is a rhetoric, a reflective argument, and a philosophy of governance. Rhetoric is commonly referred to as an art of persuasion. Aristotle defined it as the technique of discovering the persuasive aspects of any given subject-matter. Classical rhetoric emphasises the speaker and is concerned with creating and teaching the art of public speaking. New rhetoric, which developed in the second half of the twentieth century, is an emphasis on appeal to the views and values of particular audiences and the structuring of argument.

More on the emergence of interface design as a discipline here →

Design that is effective has an influence and impact on a human subject’s belief, behaviour, or action. User Experience as a discipline isn’t neutral — it shapes how we think, what we buy, and even who we become.

Design is the intention behind a default state. When we create designs, we’re defining what is possible or what is highly encouraged within the context of our products. By implication, we’re also defining what is discouraged. Michel Foucault talked about governance as structuring the field of action for others. Governance is the processes, systems, and principles through which a group, organisation, or society is managed and controlled. In this way, design is governance as long as it shapes how a product or service will be used, and restricts people’s existing or emergent choices, even when they’re not a user themselves.

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This toolkit is broken up into chapters that reflect the phases of a human-centred design process.

1. We start with discovery, diving into foundational research, stakeholder mapping, persona building, and culminating at an honest and earnest user journey.

2. We move onto the defining stage of synthesis, where we take the help of some time-tested frameworks to arrive at robust insights from our raw research findings. We’ll be setting the stage for a constructive and successful generative phase.

3. Lastly, we’ll go through the doing phase, perhaps the most intense of all — where we’ll revisit our user journey maps through task-flows. We will define our information architecture, draw a concept model of our product and start sketching wireframes.

4. And because iteration is inescapable in the design process, we’ll conclude right back at discovery — a short chapter on user testing, thus bringing us full circle from research to research.