Design Philosophy Statement
Tarang Gupta
Wisebro Innovation Lab
contact@wisebro.in
Part 1. Process and Rationale
Logical steps to understand a problem would always bring you closer to the solution. Although, the solution and the problem are both ephemeral.; And they evolve as they move forward in time.
Exposed to a variety of design challenges and approaches in Architecture and UX experience, my design process involves clearing off all the pre-determined ideas and starting afresh, with no biases. I develop concepts based on my knowledge and what the users may aspire to have. I strongly believe that logic & clarity of context can go a long way in any project.
To understand a problem and its context, I start by stripping it off of all its complexities — slowly removing all that's unnecessary–– and carefully capturing each detail and intricacy. While doing so, I question the usefulness of each component, thoroughly making note of every detail. This leads me to the crux of the problem. This also helps me attain an in-depth clarity of the background context. While I perform this activity I am also gathering information. Thus, forming a well-structured and detailed overall story for the problem space.
Once, I have formed this bird’s eye view of the problem, I start collecting precedents – existing attempts to solve the problem; and learn from them. This gives me leverage to build over. Basically, as most would say “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”.
Analyzing findings and notes from secondary research guide my next steps. After evaluating the identified core problem, I start plotting the flow of information visually - to put my understanding on the table. This helps the team communicate and discuss their ideas, usually. In this process, my knowledge and hypotheses get evaluated by the team, and sometimes the users. I find it helpful to go back to this information-flow diagram from time to time. This helps me alleviate the feeling of confusion or getting overwhelmed with work.
With this, the actual work shall commence. I start by evaluating all my options and developing a tentative project plan to work on. This is a good point to start sketching ideas and visualizing the components identified earlier. Use this to rearrange them basis its severity or urgency. This also gives me the chance to identify inherent connections between these components. These ‘points of connections’ often have useful information– such as triggers, user-intents, call-to-actions, platform-used, and other artifacts! This comes in handy when modeling content or conducting user testing later on. Thus, creating a dense neural network of understandable information.
I start my design process with hand-sketching, as I love to draw. I create multiple sketches with ideas for each of the components and form a singular narrative to bind them together. As the design moves forward I try to create multiple options and run quick A/B test comparisons between them. This is also how I make all my key decisions.
Constant reviewal from the client and other designers is super important, it helps add detail and fix bugs! As the design moves from low-fidelity to high-fidelities, constantly adding simple but logical details makes me prepare a great first prototype for a solution. Such clarity often lets me take the first stab at any given problem!
Once all the components are well-detailed, and the system is set up, I find it essential to get my work evaluated and tested out. Testing and evaluation help get rid of any other bugs or issues that might have developed. I take that back to the table and reiterate my design. Designing and Testing keep looping and is the final step of my design process.
Part 2. Design Philosophy
There are five main tenets of my design process, which are:
- Data gathering is the backbone of research
In user research, alongside data-points on participants’ aspirations, it is key to capture their actual intentions. Their reactions, in-session performances, aspirations, and/or general understanding of a system provide insights and help us connect the dots. A researcher, thus, requires to follow a well-thought-of action plan to plant ‘capture points that effectively form the general paradigm. This can only be achieved by the clarity attained by immersing totally in the problem. When starting from scratch, I always try to;
1. Set Goals — and always remember the objective of the study in the simplest words, and keep working with the plan.
2. Identify targets — find participants and artifacts that actually get affected by the identified problem.
3. Triangulate[1] — include multiple perspectives in the research and maintain the objectivity of the study. It is also important to be an active observer with a birds-eye view.
4. Take effective notes — capture all the data efficiently. Tools can vary from hand-written detailed notes to audio and video recordings. Furthermore, keep recalling the study goals and why you’re doing this study. Findings are just the outcomes of the process [2]. - A structured and systematic approach is the key
Designers and researchers are required to deal with a lot of data, along with project requirements, assumptions, findings, and concepts. A process-driven approach of keeping track and constantly organizing information is of utmost importance in the entire lifetime of work. As work progresses, the magnitude of information increases, and so does its complexity. Systematic categorization of data would help us make sense of it, as it is only human to get thrown off by the amount of information constantly fed. Following this process properly would make information start talking to us, and facilitate in deriving ideas and solutions. Furthermore, it is important to keep going back to map the initial data and findings. Staying on top of a profiled user’s requirements and expectations helped me achieve design goals in a project from when I was working as a UX professional. We followed a strict system of classifying and appropriately tagging all primary and secondary research data, user-profiles and aspirations, pain-points, and so on. This helped us work on minute details, and formulate an analysis to reveal a pattern. With this level of clarity, we achieved our design solution which matched with our client’s expectations and made them happy. - Complex problems get overwhelming, always stride towards finding and designing for the crux of the problem.
Designing to solve complex problems is a complex problem in itself. But, with a view of the larger picture, the process of problem-solving becomes much bearable. To achieve a bird’s eye view over the realm of the problem and its context, I always try to strip the subject (the problem) in question, to its bare bones. This exploded view helps me understand the entirety of the problem-space, all this to find the root cause of the problem, which would become my design-core. So, instead of just wrapping my head around the solution, I focus my time and energy on understanding the problem & its context, asking relevant questions, breaking workflows down into smaller pieces, and then finally making a plan to work on the actionable(s) that would eventually become the actual logical solution for that complex-problem.
“But don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity. Don’t go because you want to do something virtuous. Go because you want to do something difficult.” (Martin, 2016) - Human-Computer Interaction should never harm the Human-Human Interaction.
Technology is changing the way we experience life. Simultaneously, we are getting introduced to new risks, and concerns, which can increase both social tension and social seclusion between users and non-users. Sherry Turkle, in her TedTalk, talks about how social interactions on the internet give users the ability to represent the best version of themselves, and that they can make edits — “not too much, not too little, just about right.” That way, users are always connected, always interacting, always sharing, but still not making a conversation. Even when they seem to be always instant messaging on their devices, continually gawking at the screens, and even sleeping with their phones! This new form of ‘social interaction, though, has merits; raises many concerns. I, as a user, always evaluate my design decisions to work in tandem with the Human-Human connection, by making use of technology to improve and aid bonds. It is undeniable that Technology, in the context of social and collaborative computing, has spurred groundbreaking developments in domains such as healthcare, organizational communication, and education. I believe that righteousness and intent to do good should always be an integral part of the design decisions I make. - Always receive design-critique with a grain of salt.
Design is an iterative process. And, when designing for users, there is no single perfect solution. So, useful user feedback plays a vital role. But, I have seen that, when asked for a design critique, many if not all users may not have enough experience to provide a well-framed, compelling critique. Experts may throw-off a designer as well.
“Experts may not necessarily produce feedback with a better writing style, but they provided stronger and clearer justifications for their critique. These findings motivate further investigation into how feedback systems can structure high-quality feedback” (Yuan, A. et al., 2016).
Tanner Christensen discusses his learnings from Facebook’s design critique practices. He shares an instance about how users easily delineate from the issues in the context of the interface and their reflection on their ease-of-use, but start questioning the product idea! I observed this problem up-front. In one project, my team and clients spent several hours discussing the placeholder icons on the lo-fi wireframes! Imagine, so much time just wasted talking about stuff that didn’t even matter at that phase of the design. So, for the next leg of the design-feedback meeting, we always presented them with an agenda and an overview of the context. We also introduced them to the concept of low-fidelity wireframing by first explaining the entire UX process and then showing an example of a wireframe for a made-up problem. This idea, of educating the clients with the design process, became a template for all UX feedback presentations at the studio.
References
[1] Kolko, Jon. “Thinking about People (Links to an external site.)” from Thoughts on Interaction Design. 2011. pp. 20–39
[2] Moggridge, Bill. “People (Links to an external site.)” from Designing Interaction. 2007. pp. 664–681
[3] Alvin Yuan, et. al. 2016. Almost an Expert: The Effects of Rubrics and Expertise on Perceived Value of Crowdsourced Design Critiques. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW ‘16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1005–1017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819953
[4] Tanner Christensen, (2016). Four Things Working at Facebook Has Taught Me about Design Critique.
[5] Bevan, N (n.d). What is the difference between the purpose of usability and user experience evaluation methods?. Retrieved from:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.460.6252&rep=rep1&type=pdf/
(Links to an external site.)
[6] James McGarry (2017) Evaluation methods and why we need them. Retrieved from https://medium.com/ux-news/evaluation-methods-4dd717d29a9
[7] Jenny Preece et al. (2002). “Chapter-13:” Introducing Evaluation” in Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction.
