Wipe the slate clean
One hazard of working in a busy consultancy is the endless waves of projects that hit your desk. They limit your time to digest what you’ve been through, to reflect, to learn new skills, or even to just prepare yourself properly for the next project. As a result, you can fall victim to to all sorts of cognitive biases, or in laymans terms you start to make bad decisions because of a burnt-out mind.
Everything looks like a nail
When frantically hopping from one project to the next, you conveniently realise that the most recent methods, styles, layouts and UI components you’ve used are somehow a great fit for the next project. You’ll defend them like your own children, and you’ll even convince yourself that they’re exactly what’s needed; after all, you’ve just been through a situation vaguely similar to this. The worry is that you will end up producing very similar websites for all sorts of clients no matter the domain, requirements, or end users. You can easily see the results of this effect looking through agency portfolios.
Cognitive bias
A study of medicine in 1950′s England assessed what variables influence a doctor’s decision when prescribing medicine. These days the medicine we get is decided upon based on the best of medical knowledge, recent journal papers, longitudinal case studies, recent local evidence and numerous other factors. However in the 1950′s the key variables weren’t quite as precise; in fact, the two most significant variables were the year the doctor graduated and and what else had been recently prescribed.
When I first learned of this study I used it to draw a similarity between doctors peddling medicines from back when they were in college and Computer Science professors doing the same with programming languages. However it can be just as common for designers. After all, the site you already have in Photoshop/Omnigraffle/Textmate is the easiest one to build again, right?
The need to reset
To ensure my brain is open to new ideas, and that I’m really exploring the solution space, I have a ritual that takes no more than a couple of hours, and always produces some nice ideas that would otherwise be skipped over.
If I was designing an analytics application for monitoring conference registrations based on marketing campaigns, I’d first ask myself a few of the following questions
- What would this look like if it was an iPhone app?
- What would it look like if it was a Windows Desktop app?
- What would it look like if Jakob Nielsen designed it?
- What if it was an XBOX game?
- What if the app relied heavily on good typography?
- What if the app used images only?
- What does a horrible solution look like?
Answering each of these merits a sketch, a simple disposable sketch. It’s rare that one of these sketches doesn’t produce a nice idea, but most importantly it removes any availability or confirmation bias that would prevent good design work from happening. My most recent ideas are varied, and none of them are based on my last project.
This is important not just for you client’s sake, but for your own. As Paul Graham says: “Obstacles upstream propagate downstream”. If all you design are 3 column banner based websites, don’t be surprised if over time that is all you can design. The only way to progress as designer is to constantly challenge yourself approaching each project with a clear head and an open mind.
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