Giving it a go

Last week, I said I wasn’t going to call these weeknotes. I also said the chances of me writing every week were slim.

Yet, here I am, one week later.

I’ve been working on another post about the role of AI in an end-to-end design process and the critical designer in the loop. It isn’t ready, so it can wait. Plus, I was excited by the themes I heard in a project share yesterday that I wanted to write about straight away.

Every couple of weeks, everyone who practises interaction and product design across TPXimpact comes together. We call it our community of practice, and it’s a very purposeful space.

It’s about being a multiplier. We’re not just smart individuals, off on our own projects, where only that project gets the benefit of that one person. Everyone brings what they know to the pot in the middle. We stir it around, and the knowledge and experience become shared. Then people take it back to their projects. Each project gets the benefit of a much broader, more diverse set of skills and experience than just the people on it.

That’s the intent. This week, it did exactly that.

Chloe Dare joined our team this year and has already made a great impact. Great attitude. Shows up with good energy. A real can-do approach to giving things a go.

At this week’s session, Chloe shared a recent project. Running through the share were themes of adaptability, making progress and ultimately: giving it a go. I think that applies to so much of what we do. Not just our team. Designers in general.

Design is about making progress

As far as I’m concerned, one of the main things design does is make progress. It moves the needle on the work a team is doing.

It isn’t about having too great a need for certainty. That stifles you from doing anything. It’s one of the things I see sometimes in the organisations I work with. Months can go by, sometimes years, without real progress, because nobody is 100% certain. I say, you don’t need to be. What’s our best guess assumption? Start there.

One of the superpowers of design, and one I talk about a lot, is showing people what the future looks like. We can take all the different things stakeholders and teams are saying, make them tangible, show them, and ask: how wrong is this?

It’s really useful when it’s wrong. It gets the conversation going. It helps us make progress.

And even a small piece of progress, on its own, can unlock permission to do more. People see what we can do. That opens up the next conversation.

We demonstrate value by doing.

We don’t have all the answers, and neither should we. Not knowing means we ask the questions that other people have stopped asking. When you’ve been around a problem for years, sometimes decades, it’s easy to accept that things are the way they are because that’s how they’ve always been. We can go in and ask: what if it worked a different way? What if we did it like this? Competence makes you stop asking those questions.

Then we give it a go. We don’t zero in on a single solution. We ideate and prototype several, and see which are most likely to solve the problem.

And if one fails completely? Great. We’ve worked out one way not to do it; quickly and cheaply. That’s far better than months of sprints of build, shipping it to users, communicating change, and only then finding out it doesn’t work and having to unpick it all.

Being right doesn’t help if the team can’t move

I see a risk in some designers, who hesitate in giving it a go; are too dogmatic about what to do, and too rigid about following a specific process.

It doesn’t matter whether that process is right or wrong. You can be right in principle. But if what you’re saying is slowing a whole team making progress, it doesn’t matter that you’re right.

Giving it a go doesn’t mean throwing all process out. It means trusting that we can make progress with a process, it’s just knowing that the process won’t always be the same. That’s another superpower of design: it’s flexible

I always say adaptability is a designer’s greatest skill. Whether that’s tooling, process, or the environment and context we’re working in. The lovely variable is the different humans who come together on every project. The best designers adapt and pivot when they need to, rather than holding rigidly and dogmatically to their ideals. Strong opinions, loosely held.

(It’s being agile, really. Small a, not the big-A framework. Actually agile, in reality.)

Making decisions with what you know at the time

At the heart of giving it a go is making decisions based on the information you have at the time.

You can always look back on a project and think: I might have done that differently. It’s easy for someone on the outside to be critical, too. To look at it and say: I wouldn’t have done it that way.

But they weren’t in the room. They weren’t the one making the decision, with the context you had at the time.

More designers need to be brave about this. Make the best decision you can with what you know. Then, as new information comes in, sense and respond. Pivot. Change.

Change is another relevant topic this week. Change can be good. It can be bad. And sometimes bad change in the moment leads to good change in the long run. I wrote about this a looong time ago. If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies. It’s one I need to revisit from the vault. But the idea still holds. We can’t always stop change, but we can adapt to it.

Give it a go

I wanted to write this to celebrate Chloe, in the open. It was a great presentation, and there’s a message in it for all of us.

Most often, we don’t know the right answer. Give it a go anyway. That’s how we make progress.

There’s still a post sitting in my drafts that isn’t ready. This one might not be either. I gave it a go anyway.

Thanks Chloe, I appreciate you.