Myopia is killing your success as a designer

You’ve meticulously designed a beautiful interface to solve a user problem. You proudly present it to product and engineering… and it gets brutally demolished.

They think you haven’t designed a coherent workflow. They're calling out all sorts of seemingly trivial details that are incorrect or haven't been considered. And what you’ve created impacts other, far flung parts of the product experience that perhaps you haven’t grasped as well as you thought.

We’ve all been there at some point or another. It is not a fun place to be. Engineers have to implement every detail in an interface and are amazing at catching things that we miss. Product managers are on the hook for creating business value so they’re constantly considering the consequences of our design decisions.

Not considering the impact of a design on the product as a whole, failing to address unhappy paths, and missing opportunities to reuse existing design patterns gets you sidelined fast.

So what can we do about it? This is a subtle and challenging problem to overcome. But it's completely surmountable. You need two things:

1) To know how to practice crucial but subtle soft skills.

2) A blueprint for how to be a systematic, farseeing designer.

Read on and you'll get just enough of the former and a whole lot of the latter. To start with, you have to learn how to habitually zoom out when you're confronted with a design problem.

Zoom out

Design excellence comes down to cultivating habits of mind. One such habit is to reflexively zoom out every time you commence work on a design project. At first, you make a conscious effort to do so. Over time it becomes an ingrained habit.

If you want to be more systematic and credible, every time you sit down to work on a design project write out the answers to these questions:

• Who is the customer and what is the pain point we're addressing?
• What business value are we trying to create with this feature?
• How does this feature fit with our overall product strategy?
• What other parts of the product will be affected?
• What stakeholders need to be convinced for us to ship this?
• Who can we get feedback from, inform, but don't have to win over?

Zooming out and seeing the bigger picture as a designer is deeply wrapped up with understanding and driving business value. We'll be talking a lot more about in the next few weeks.

Having a clear sense of the bigger picture will help you design the product as a whole, not just a series of disconnected interfaces. You're less likely to run into problems with engineering if you're using patterns consistently across the product. You're more likely to find support from your PM if you understand what value they are trying to drive with your feature. And you can avoid painful late stage design blowups if you're properly tracking and managing your stakeholders.

Once you've gotten a sense for the bigger picture of your design work, the next step is to sift through endless tiny details and handle them all. Excellent products earn compound interest on perfecting countless details. So how can we wrangle this infinite web of design decisions?

Analyze branches

Branch analysis is the practice of tracing paths through a network to determine all the possible avenues of traversal.

Start by defining some scenarios: consider a first time user, a returning beginner, and an experienced power user. For each, ask yourself: Where does their workflow begin? From there, proceed through your proposed solution step by step. At each step consider what could go wrong and what states you'll have to accommodate. Map these various paths in a flow diagram.

Your first goal is coverage. Do you have every contingency accounted for?

Your second goal is optimization. Where is the user deriving benefit, where are they experiencing friction, and how can you rebalance the experience towards the former?

Experiences often degenerate at the connection points between features. As you map the experience, find and eliminate these points of degeneration. Design products, not interfaces.

This pattern of thinking will also be incredibly valuable to you as you go beyond designing products to designing teams and even companies. Branch analysis and scenario planning will help you make better bets, manage risk, and keep your teams productive. We'll be talking more about those techniques in future.

Ultimately design is about patterns: patterns of thought, but more concretely, patterns of pixels.

Establish patterns

Designing systematically is about generalizing patterns of pixels so you can solve related classes of user problems elegantly. That's also what engineers are attempting to accomplish, which is why unsystematic design is so immensely frustrating to them.

Systematic design is about creating familiar rhythms and currents that help users effortlessly glide towards their destination.

• Is there an existing design solution to this problem?
• Can a slightly modified, existing design solve this problem?
• Should we create a new pattern with broad applicability beyond this feature?

I strongly recommend actually writing out answers to these questions. Do that for 6 weeks until you're habitually thinking in this manner. Then grasp the next slippery hand hold and keep climbing. Don't move too quick or you'll fall. Take your time to really set your grip so you can ratchet up your progress in steady increments.

Of course, that's easy to say when you're writing an article on your day off while sipping a mai tai. But when fires are burning, it's hard to take a step back and implement some wild-eyed scheme for self-improvement. So what can we do about it? Keep things simple.

The simple path

As intractable as catching every detail, contingency, and implication may seem, it really comes down to asking a small handful of questions. The simplest way to improve is to have those questions at hand when you need them and consistently write out answers that help guide your work.

Sign up below and I'll send you a free one page cheat sheet that you can reference as you go about your design work to help simplify your day to day improvement in this area. I frequently use it myself to stave off myopia.

In the next few weeks I'll be talking a lot more about concretely understanding and driving business value as a product designer.

If you make your business more successful, you and your users will also become more successful. It's a virtuous cycle that you are a critical part of as a product designer.

If you're already part of my list, thank you for your support. You can get access to your free cheat sheet below. Please let me know if I can do anything else to help.