Designing is usually a rewarding activity, but the path from start to finish can be filled with frustration and even panic. I’ve seen design processes work—and come to the realisation that “My own designs benefited from rapid iteration!”
These humbling experiences helped me learn to trust the process, even in the face of frustration or panic. It’s these experiences that give me the courage to follow the design process, even when it isn’t clear how to resolve the tension between conflicting design constraints.
In the face of an unknown, individuals and especially teams tend to turn to knowns. If needed, they’ll manufacture the known data, by deferring the choice to users. Here’s part of what Larry Constantin wrote about courage in software design, in a paper that advocates for user involvement at the right time:
Most damning and least recognized among the limitations of user-centered design is the way it subtly discourages courage. Courage is one of the central tenets of extreme programming and agile development methods. […] User-centered design makes it too easy for designers to abdicate responsibility in deference to user preference, user opinion, and user bias. In truth, it is hard to stick with something you know works when users are screwing up their faces at it. What if you are wrong? What if you are not as good a designer as you thought you were? It takes real courage and conviction to stand up for an innovative design in the face of users who complain that it is not what they expected or who want it to work just like some other software or who object to certain sorts of features as a matter of course. It takes responsible judgment to know when to listen to users and when to ignore them.
In the many design sessions I have facilitated, three times I’ve seen that lack of courage expressed by a participant. Each time, it sounded like a mix of panic and frustration:
The solution has been on the wall since the first round!
The design sessions I facilitate ask participants to saturate the design space with lots of ideas. They each bring five sketches—five substantially different ideas—and then, after sharing their ideas with the other participants, they rapidly iterate the first 15 or 20 sketches to develop even more. All this takes place before any analysis.
When the goal is to saturate the design space—to identify as many solutions as possible in a short time—there’s more to influence the design once the analysis begins. Inevitably, the design that the team decides on was not already on the wall. Motivated design participants quickly learn this, and—in most cases—become advocates of the process.
For most development teams, the Five Sketches™ process I introduce is a departure from the status quo, so it takes courage for their team members to take a stand, to say “I will use this process” for design problems that need it.
