Design Research – the fuel to design?

I recently attended Yahoo! Usability and User Research Conference in Seoul. It was an internal conference focused on methodologies and sharing amongst various international offices.

I have already known the value of research in design and this conference just concretized by belief and trust in design research. Any design process needs design decisions. Making the right decision is important to make your product/solution accurate. If you think closely how do we make these decisions?

These are based on our past experiences, our understanding of the users and mostly our ‘biases/assumptions’. I would say majority of our decision are based on what we think (read as ‘assume’) the user would want. Thus there is a lot of ambiguity and differences in what is need and what we assume is needed.

This is where the design research fills the gap. It becomes a bridge between the user and the designer. I personally feel any kind of design research has a lot to offer to designers. Even though they may not make an impact the top management; there is a huge value in day to day working of designers. As designers we should seek as many cue and clues what help us build a better understanding of the actual usage. The objective- reduce assumption and build concrete understanding. The less assumption we build on our design I feel the better designs we can deliver.

So I would suggest treat your design researchers very well. Treat them & give them gift because these are people who could really help you create better designs. And this not only helps you in a specific product/project. These understanding are going to stay with you for very long. This may have direct impact on current project but indirectly this is going to have significant impacts on products/project to come in future.

Design Evolves

Evolution is important; humans evolved to become better ‘designed’ beings (better? umm…do u agree). But we definitely evolved. During the course of your evolution we phased different challenges; which kept changing with time and the environment. This shaped us and made better to face these challenges – read Better Design.

Thus design evolves – to be better. It all starts from the very beginning – when you think about a product you start with an idea. Then we start to add up parameters of environment (competitors; users; their needs, technology etc.), this slowly shapes up the product. It may start by random thoughts/sketches (unicellular bacteria) to a working prototype (complex multi-system organism). The design evolves (constantly improving) from an idea to a prototype and then finally into a full product. The parameters keep adding up, changing the design. Its survival depends of its evolution; shaped up by the design decisions. Bad Decisions?? You are extinct.

Does the story end here? No. Even after the launch it has to keep evolving to be in the race. The ‘survival of the fittest’ remember? To be the best you have to compete with the changing environment (competitors, users, technology, business etc.).

Thus the changing environment - keeps changing the designs. It’s a constant race. And evolution is a reality.

This applies to all the fields I guess. So it’s better to be prepared and conscious of it rather than being surprised by it. Thus keep looking for the changes happening around you. You never know when an ape transform into a human and then takes you to a point of extinction. Be informed, be adaptive and keep evolving.

Built on decisions

Design is all about design decisions…at every stage you are trying to decide what will work for your designs. These decisions came very early in design – be it deciding what product you want to make to how would it look to how would it work…

At all step you are involved in taking decisions; and success of your design closely depend on these decisions.

The most important part of design decision is how many parameters are involved in that decision. The more the parameters you are using to take the decision the probability of creating a good design is more. What it means is that your designs are designed for all those parameters. It like you have to create a protective cover for an art work; so you want to make sure that the cover takes care of ALL those things/conditions that “will or may” damage that art work. The same is for design; you try to make sure you cover all aspects that are going to affect the product you are designing.

Another critical aspect of design decisions is their “interdependency”. What do I mean by that? Well I mean is all along the design process you would be taking certain decisions at say ‘stage 1’. Now when you move to ‘stage 2’ you would be taking another set of decisions. But now these decisions will be highly depended on what you decided at ‘stage 1’. Thus all along the design you would be taking decisions which you be so inter depended that if you try to change a certain decision that you took at a lower stage the whole design would fall into pieces. It’s like a pyramid build of cards. If you remove a lower card the whole pyramid falls apart. This is because of these interdependencies of the design decision.

If you take one wrong decision you land up with a wrong design…and if you realize is late – you are dead!. Thus design is one profession where you need to be very sure of what you are doing. And to add to the complexity the decisions that are involved are very “subjective”, with each path/decision having certain pros and cons. This is where the real adventure lies? Is it?

But with thorough logic, analysis and understanding you can to a large extent reduce the unknowns of design and bring in some objectivity in design decisions. Thus design is not about creativity it’s also about analysis and research…find out the problem and the solution will find you…