You’re not making design decisions if you don’t have a design process

If design feels subjective on your team, chances are, you're presenting design guesses instead of design decisions. You need an evidence-gathering design process to make great design decisions.

If you’ve ever brought your designs for review, you’ll know that design can be subjective. The subjectivity comes through the differing feedback that pulls your solution in opposite directions. You might do your best to explain your intent, but the discussion becomes muddy and unfocused. Chances are, you couldn’t push subjectivity aside because you presented design guesses instead of design decisions.

A design decision is the rationale behind why your designs look and behave the way they do. For example, using a checkbox group over a freeform text input, so that you can rely on recognition over recall to make a form cognitively easier to complete, is a design decision. Without evidence supporting why the form becomes easier, in this example using recognition over recall, it becomes a design guess. Design guesses are hard to rally behind because they lack anything that lets you estimate their validity or value.

Your design process is your opportunity to gather the evidence you need to make great design decisions. The type of evidence you gather should be analogous to the kind of decisions you’re looking to make. Let’s consider the methods in our process and how to feed them into our design decisions.

Translate situations into experiences

Imagine you’re building a product to help individuals make climate conscious purchases. How do you know if you should build a sustainable goods marketplace, a product comparison tool, or some other type of experience?

If we take the steps to understand our users and their environments, we can make evidence-backed design decisions by translating the user situations we discover into product flows. In this case, a round of generative user research may reveal that we’re designing for avid social media users who frequently make purchases based on ads. Instead of a marketplace or tool, we might meet users where they’re at by designing a conversational UI for a social media bot that recommends products based on your users’ social media ads.

Instead of discovering for discovery’s sake, here are a few situation sleuthing methods:

• You want to understand what resources a user relies on → Conduct a demographics and interests survey

• You want to understand how a user currently completes a task → Ask user research participants to walk you through the last time they completed this task

• You want to understand the physical limitations a user has while completing a task → Shadow your users in their real world environments

Exchange behaviors for interactions

When deciding on the nittier, grittier details of patterns and interactions, we need to understand people’s behaviors and habits. We can improve product performance by using patterns that encourage the user behavior we want to see. For example, say you’re building a meal diary app and need your users to record more meals. If you let your design process uncover that your users habitually take photos of their meals, you could accommodate this behavior by supporting photo diary entries.

Here are a few methods to help you make pattern and interaction level design decisions:

• Copy what similar products do successfully → Ask user research participants to complete similar tasks across competitor products

• Look for behaviors that your users already exhibit → Audit your product for interesting, but unintended, ways that people are using your product

• Validate your product use cases → Run a scenario based usability test evaluating how users complete tasks with your product

Transform feelings into framing

There was a time when the the hottest thing a designer could do was build delight into a product. The craze for delight eventually fizzled out though, when teams struggled to justify prioritizing these types of designs.

The fixation on delight had us overlooking the higher level goal to put users in an advantageous frame of mind. For example, take a task like studying. Studying doesn’t suddenly feel fun if we see a few confetti animations, it feels fun if we think we’re playing a game. If we can identify how our users are feeling, we can use design to adjust their frame of mind. Here are some methods to gather emotional evidence:

• You want to understand how negative feelings affect your product → Chart how user sentiment changes throughout a user journey

• You want to know the impression users have of your product → Ask users to list 3-5 adjectives or phrases to describe your product

• You want to understand what affects user preferences → Show 2-3 versions of your product to a new user and ask them which version they prefer and why

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Design is still a relatively new field and many non-designers don’t understand that it’s a tool to solve problems. Design will always be subjective, but we can model how objective it can be by presenting design decisions grounded in real-world evidence. With even a few layers of subjectivity removed, you’ll find that your team is not only able to align on projects, but also have a much better understanding of your role and function as a designer.

Gathering evidence takes time and energy, but we can always revamp how we gather and store our evidence. Our design processes aren’t baking recipes; they’re flexible and interchangeable steps. Once we’re familiar with the terrain, we can move nimbly, picking out the specific steps that will get us to where we need to go. We’ll even pick up shortcuts by applying past evidence. At the end, a clear, objective view will be waiting for us.