Understanding ‘Good’ Design Process

There are many debates and discussions around defining what is a ‘Good’ design. If you are a designer, you must have come across at least one conversation about it. In this article, I am sharing my understanding of good design.

Good design is seamless. It blends into the environment, it will come to you as second nature.

‘Good design is seamless’

It took me a while to learn this, rather I would say I am still learning. If it is a good design, it will blend into the environment, it will come to you as second nature. I have spent years studying good design and what makes it good and there is no one right answer to it but I can break it down for you.

I see it as a recipe, you need to have the right ingredient but that is not enough! You need to understand how these ingredients work individually and how they work with one another. Then comes the structure, where you put the ingredients in a rhythm, one after the other. If you did every step of it with honesty and love, this is where the intention is determined, your dish will be a delight!

So, what is the recipe for good design?

Identifying & Understanding Ingredients

You might not have all the answers, to begin with, but identifying all the important questions is the first step.

Before solving any problem no matter how big or small, these are a few questions to start with in order to understand all the ingredients you have:

1. What is the problem?
2. What is the root cause?
3. Can it be broken into smaller problems?
4. Who is it benefiting?
5. Why was this problem not solved earlier?
6. How are people managing it currently?
7. What changes will it bring to the current system?
8. Who will be the stakeholders in solving the problem?
9. What will be the impact of solving this problem?
10. How long will it take to solve this problem?

You might not have all the answers, to begin with, but identifying all the important questions is the first step.

These 10 questions are your key ingredients. As you begin to identify your problem you will learn to break them down.

Structure

Breaking it down into smaller tasks will help in defining the structure.

Once you know your questions, they will lead you to the answers. Then you break it down into smaller tasks and define a structure. What needs to come first and what can be done later, this structure will help the system organise itself.

Defining smaller goals help us achieve them faster, and it is easier to test them in a real environment. If it fails, there is enough room for improvement without wasting a lot of time and effort.

Tasting your dish in preparation from time to time is the best way to know where you are headed.

Setting up the intention

You might be working for a company and solving a problem like improving the visibility or in your own start-up, you are solving for proving the product-market fix, or you are solving a larger global problem like climate change. How do you decide your intention?

Designers read this carefully.
You are a problem solver, not a person who makes things look beautiful, well yes, that is one of your superpowers too, but that is not it. No matter what you are solving for, your role is to understand the system as a whole. When you take ownership, your intention automatically is set right from the core.

Well, you might be thinking shouldn’t this intention setting be done before picking up the problem, well, no! Unless you understand what you are solving you can’t decide if your heart is in it or not.

So, are we done creating a good design?

No, this is when you are ready to build a good design. This is the process people don’t talk about much. All we see is a seamless, obvious design and we appreciate it and most often we don’t appreciate it because we can not see it. It is so good that it blends in with its environment making it seamless.