Howdy
How are you doing today? Good. My name is Chase Thiebaut. I am a 1st year graduate student of Human Computer Interaction Design at Indiana University Bloomington currently searching for a 2018 summer internship. I graduated from Ball State University with a major in Computer Science and 2 years of User Experience Designer experience The Digital Corps and Ball State University.
In addition to design work, I have a love for music and spend much of my time writing and performing music. I also spent two years performing in the Award-Winning Ball State Acappella group Note To Self.
Design Process
A Blog Post
When I started my UX Design job 3 years ago at The Digital Corps they laid out the design process neat and simply. There were roughly 7 steps of design. All of them were different from each other and seemed to build on the outcomes of the previous steps. When I recently tasked myself with trying to figure out what steps I would include and how to define them if I were in my previous supervisor's position I created the diagram below.
And, for the most part, this is generally how I do see my design process. I place a large emphasis on defining the problem that a possible solution is meant to solve and not taking given problem statements at face value. For example, if a user says they want to highlight text in an audiobook, what is it that they really wish to accomplish? Instead of immediately focusing on how to make a proper highlight system, I instead value taking time considering the varied reasons why people highlight physical books and what they hope to accomplish by doing so and then considering the best way to transfer that value into an audiobook platform while keeping the strengths of the audiobook platform in mind as opposed to strictly copying functionality from a physical to computer based solution.
So, I was fairly happy with my diagram. But I knew it was missing an important aspect that so many design process diagrams had. Arrows.
So, I tried adding in arrows. I had already laid out the steps in a fairly logical circular order. In fact, I still believe that a great design could come out of performing these steps once each in this order.
But this diagram ignored iterations, the process of repeating steps to improve or augment parts or the whole of a design. I've been in courses that allocate a nearly equal time to iterating a "finished" design as they do to creating that design in the first place.
One could say that this diagram accounts for that by cycling the arrows in a continuous circle. But, in my experience that's not normally how it happens.
Enter Ambiguity
Ambiguity is an area where I seem to spend a lot of time while designing. What does the client want from me on this project? What is the purpose of this design in the first place? How will I proceed in this process when I can't see any way through? These ambiguous situations are hard places to find myself sometimes. However, at Indiana University I was taught to embrace my constraints and to embrace ambiguity. Creative solution often come out of cramped and tight creative spaces. So, even though I saw some problems with it, I continued on and decided to add arrows between several of the steps in the diagram along paths between steps that I often find myself traversing.
So... There it was. Most of the paths between steps that I considered common in my design process. Yes - common. See, if the world was simple and designs were obvious, the blue diagram above could be followed every time and a designer could rest on the accuracy of their diagram.
But design isn't simple. If design were simple, we wouldn't need designers. I used to look at design from an outsider's perspective as a computer programmer. I used to look and think, "that looks simple, why isn't everyone just doing that?". And I think part of the answer lies in the idea that people don't enjoy designing enough.
Let me explain. In any given design project, there are a large number of times that should make someone feel like quitting and giving up. I am told that this phenomenon does not ever truly die down no matter how experienced the designer or how "simple" the problem is. I think that a lot of people aren't designers because they simply do not enjoy the process and experience enough to power through and take delight from those times that are meant to make a designer want to give up and quit. The designers are the ones who are okay with understanding that a design is never really finished in their own eyes. They are like the developers who update old projects on their GitHub repos years later because they had a dream about how to improve their software. I feel that designers have such high levels of satisfaction because on some level to be a good designer you have to love what you do. Even when that includes embracing ambiguity and spending hours on a Saturday creating a design process diagram.