Helping designers design for non-designers

1. Blind Mountain Climbing
Nathan Kane
UI designer & developer
My UI design process, and how you can help

2. Solve user problems while meeting business goals
My goal as a designer

3. A design process is the
mixture of two activities
INPUT
INSTINCT

4. INPUT INSTINCT

5. The product design process is knowing
which questions to ask who, when
INPUT & INSTINCT
Trust your gut or talk to someone?

6. INSTINCT

7. INSTINCT
Where does it come from?
EducationExperience
e.g usability conventions
Design philosophy

8. INSTINCT
1. Generate ideas
2. Doing design (sketches, mockups, prototypes)
3. Implicitly weighing tradeoffs—there are millions of micro-decisions in
every design, and there is no such thing as a perfect design
What is it?

9. INSTINCT
+
It’s fast
It’s fun
It’s easy
It’s never wrong*
Source of creativity, discontinous ideas
It can inject soul, personality, humanity
It differentiates the best designers and designs
Few boundaries
Everyone has it
*until Input is solicited
-
Predicting human behavior in a vacuum is hard
False empathy (bias toward “scratching your own
itch”)
Lack of expertise in certain specialties

10. INPUT

11. Consult the experts

12. Consult the experts
Core product team
Business partner
Superpower: Knows the business model and how customer
problems map to creating a healthy, growing enterprise.
Weaknesses: Seeing the implicit or broader context for
design decisions.
Nickname: Product manager, marketing manager
Where found
Lots of meetings
Chat (sometimes)
Business reviews
Engineer
Superpower: Knows and increases the scope of what’s possible
Weaknesses: Empathy for the non-technical. Caring about
beauty or fine details.
Nickname: Developer
Surrounded by monitors
Chat (all the time)

13. Consult the experts
Non-core team
Other designers
Superpowers: artistic preference
Weakness: Expertise in / caring about business or technical
matters
Nickname: Visual designers, writers, illustrators, prototypers, competitor products
Usually wearing trendy scarf
Critiques
Design reviews
Data people
Superpowers: answering behavioral usage questions,
setting up tests
Nickname: analyst, data scientist, analytics person
In Excel
Where found

14. Consult the experts
Non-core team
Senior leaders
Superpowers: aligning you to long-term strategy. Providing
the engineers to build your design. Motivating other teams
to help you.
Nickname: Directors and above
Big offices
Big reviews
Weaknesses: understanding constraints. Thinking tactically.
Target customer or user
Superpower: Knows their own problem and derivative
enhancements of current solutions. Knows if they
understand something.
Weaknesses: anticipating future behavior or knowing
what they want. What they say is not necessarily what
they do
Follow-me-homes
Usability lab / usertesting.com
Customer care or sales
Every person ever
Where found

15. What’s better than input from the experts?
Real use
• How can we get to real use as quickly as
possible to test hypotheses?
• Are we measuring the right things?

16. Designs are like
genetically-modified birds
It’s hard to know when creating them if
they’ll thrive in the wild

17. INPUT
+
• Enhances anticipated success of a design
• Answers unknowns
• Aligns the design to other external priorities
• More brains on a problem
• Gives priority and visibility to your work and
reputation
-
• Slow
• Unpredictable
• A lot of work
• Resource-intensive
• Can distract or overwhelm when low
quality or irrelevant
• Can damage morale
• “Design by committee” results in safe,
conservative, boring design

18. THE ROLE OF TIME ON DESIGN
Design quality/
probability of
success
Hard or ambiguous problemEasy or clear
problem
Problem is
presented
Days Weeks Months Years

19. Problem to solution
What is the
problem?
What are some potential
solutions?
Which solution will be
effective?
Is the solution effective?
Product designer
INPUT-HEAVY INSTINCT-HEAVY INPUT-HEAVY
Anthropology
Answer-seeking
tactic Business model
analysis
Sketching on
pen/paper
External
inspiration
Usage analytics/
reporting
Input from the
experts
Prototyping
EXPLORATION REFINEMENTUNDERSTANDING

20. Design is like blind mountain climbing
Best solution for this problem
Start here
First place you explore

21. INPUT INSTINCT

22. The product designer’s responsibility is
knowing which questions to ask who, when
INPUT & INSTINCT
Trust your gut or talk to someone?

23. Advice for how to contribute to the
design process
• “I like” is not useful input. Instead, use “It works…” or “It doesn’t
work…”, which downplay personal preference and focus on the
goal of the design.
• We get a lot of input. The designer must triage, focus, & decide
imperfectly to make forward progress. So, while your input is
always processed, the design may not move in your desired
direction, because we’ve weighed other input (and our own
instinct) agains it.
• Design is inherently imperfect. Everything is iterative. We
“satisfice” and do our best. However, better solutions tend
to come from from better-defined problems.
• Timing and timeline are critical. Particularly the time from
problem selection to delivery matters greatly. Communicate
known problems (business or user) as early as possible, and
keep us updated on any and all timing updates. Also, be
available for questions (on chat preferably).

24. And my biggest piece of advice to business folks
FRAME THE CHALLENGE
(and not the solution)
“We need a link on the stage of
the Customers tab”
BAD
“Our users don’t know how a payments
service could save them time, and if
more of them did, it could increase
revenue by $5M”
GOOD

25. End