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 orient our thinking toward participatory design —
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?
Design as Governance
UX Designer Amber Case, argues in this article, that at its core design is a rhetoric, a reflective argument, and a philosophy of governance.
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.
Products don’t decide anything. People do. But products influence decisions, often quietly, often without being noticed.
What products control is the structure around the decision. What users see first. What requires effort. What feels safe to accept and costly to change. Psychology enters through that structure, through what is made easy, visible, and repeatable.
Product decisions are often framed as moments. A click. A tap. A confirmation screen. By the time a user reaches that point, the decision has already taken shape. Options are limited. The cost of hesitation is clear. A default is waiting. [read more]
This toolkit is broken up into chapters that reflect the phases of a human-centred design process.
Discover dives into foundational research, ecosystem mapping, persona building, and culminates at building a variety of user journeys based on real world user goals.
Defining takes us into sense-making, where we use time-tested frameworks to arrive at robust insights from our raw research findings. Setting the stage for a constructive 'doing' phase.
Doing is about implementing and making tangible our ideas. We map out in-product journeys as user-flows, build a concept model of our product and start sketching our prototype with the help of heuristic principles of interface design.
Iteration is non-negotiable in the design process, and so we conclude right back at discovery — with a short chapter on prototyping and user testing -- bringing us full circle from research to research.