DESIGN / RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Inspired by Jesse James Garrett and his experiences with Adaptive Path

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Explore broadly and don’t be afraid to make mistakes: 

The more different types of problems you can apply your toolkit to, the better your toolkit becomes. You never know what sorts of things will help with the evolution of your practice. Sometimes you’ll be able to apply lessons from a completely different project to the one you are currently working on to get a better result.

Dive deep: 

If you really immerse yourself in a project, then it becomes your world. This allows some “background processing” which is a source of tremendous value because this is where the unexpected connections are made and the intuitive leaps are made. Back up the epiphanies with research.

Keep your perspective fluid:

Get away from your usual working environment, it will shift your perspective and can lead to new patterns of thinking. Reset your relationship to the world around you. Get your clients out of their day-to-day environment. Help them get some distance from a problem.

Push yourself to learn more:

It is really easy to artificially impose limitations on your own work. These will cut off ideas before they could really be fleshed out. Your ideas should scare you. Role as designer is to push the organization to go where it may not go on its own. Then the rational people around you can pull you back.

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Put away your notes: 

Read your notes, but put them away. Then ask yourself, “What are the key things this design really needs?” This trains your intuition; let your notes direction without being limited by them.

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Learn to spot your assumptions:

Be aware of what you’ve internalized, such as constraints. It can be hard to see when you’ve made a decision on something you’ve never said out loud. Learn to understand how your own decision process works.

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Stay curious:

We get so invested in the impact of our work, that we may lose interest in the things that could really make the difference. The opportunities that will help you improve as a designer, may not be the things you think.

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Be as curious about your clients as you are about your users: 

Often designers think business people are dumb, they don’t know their user, and the designer’s job is to set them right. Understand where your client is coming from. Often the culture is carried from the founders.

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Hang with different crowds: 

Hang out with different types of people (developers, business people, etc.) because you’ll better understand where they are coming from. You’d be surprised how much creativity there is in code.

Pick your battles: 

There are always compromises in the design/development process. What are the things that are the core parts of the design? What are absolutely essential to the product’s success? Fight for those, the rest goes into the next release.

Good work doesn’t speak for itself: 

You need to be able to sell your choices in a way people who don’t know design can understand.

Changing a design is easy. Changing behavior is hard: 

Remember that a single solution, no matter how great, is by no means the end all solution. It is about how the organization builds their strategies around meeting the needs of the people who use their products: Any impact you have with a single design is only temporarily.

Pay attention to your failures: 

Every failure carries with it a chance to improve your practice.

Keep up with technology and the potential it may have on the future: 

Sometimes big changes happen, but change is always taking place and if you’re not immersing yourself in it, you risk making assumptions based on old knowledge: like how the web use to work, or what mobile devises are capable of.