Having run this activity in workshops and training courses over the years, I’m confident there’ll be some mental images of chocolate-smothered ice cream, a few Clint Eastwoods in Dirty Harry, maybe the legendary photo agency, a Tom Selleck or two, or an oversized bottle of champagne. There are lots of ways to interpret and visualise this single word.
It’s a good demonstration of what happens in most meetings. Everyone nods and agrees and leaves happy, thinking their Magnum is the one everyone sees and agrees with. Disappointment and disagreement are postponed for another day.
Somewhat perversely, many people host meetings so they don’t have to make a firm decision. They encourage people to talk in the abstract without anyone having to commit.
As designers, our skill is in taking the abstract and making it real. It’s good to create something everyone can look at and have a shared conversation around. Being able to go from 0 to 1 at speed is a form of alchemy (and we can repeat this trick when what we show needs changing).
We turn our thinking into sketches, scamps, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs. We lower risk, save money and speed up project delivery by communicating ideas that facilitate more meaningful discussions. As a designer, don’t go to a meeting without one or two visuals to focus the conversation around.
Be selective. Not everything in every fidelity.
In design projects, I’ve noticed a tendency for folk to fall into the trap of stepping through the fidelity of the designs in a linear fashion. Some rounds of 6-ups then become sketches for pages before being tidied up into wireframes and passed into Figma. But you don’t always need every step for every page.
A colleague of mine has a phrase I really like: “We’re designing websites for users, not pictures of websites for users”. It’s a useful reminder that the digital design process has an end goal, and our efforts should be targeted at getting useful solutions into the hands of the user as soon as possible. In the wise words of designer Brenda Laurel: “Design isn’t finished until someone’s using it”.
The following three questions are helpful when working out what to create and what’s the right fidelity at the right time.
1. What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
Your visual output should be steered by the problem you’re trying to solve and the people you need input from. The work you create should help you explore the challenge at hand. At the early stages of a project, I generally find exploring concepts more important than the execution of the artefact. Even more so when I can show and talk through the ideas.
I’m always looking to do less where I can. The time I save can then be invested where it’ll have the most impact or where the design challenge is the trickiest.
I sketch on paper when I need to think freely, flesh out unusual ideas, or generate a wide range of possibilities. When I need to add finesse, polish and personality, I tend to work in high fidelity. But not always. If a developer can work from a sketch on a napkin or an ordered pile of post-it® notes then this is as far as I’ll take my design work.
Low fidelity doesn’t mean shallow thinking. In fact, the opposite. The best way to arrive at the concepts, metaphors, and models that will drive any design work is to do it early in a project and through many iterations and critical reviews.
You’re answering different questions with different mediums. In one complex project working with a travel company, a whiteboard was the perfect canvas to start investigating ideas. Working in a team in a shared space helped unblock inertia. The whiteboard forced conversation and collaboration, and whiteboard pens excel at preventing any chance of drawing in fine detail.
Most importantly, in this project, the next design decisions were made by people in the room who could congregate around the whiteboard.
2. What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
It’s easy for interesting ideas to get lost in the backlog or to be considered only at the end of a project if there’s any time left. Creating micro demos throughout a project helps avoid this.
These small proofs of concept don’t have to be digital. It’s amazing what you can mock up with paper, pens and basic craft equipment. You don’t have to wait until you’ve figured out the entire end-to-end journey. Better to create demos for parts of the product as you go along.
As designers, we can over-fixate on the precision of execution to the detriment of the thinking behind the design. With a demo for a concept, it’s useful to remind yourself you’re not showing the proposed design; you’re showing your ideas that may (or may not) edge toward being the delivered design.
Performance, accessibility, browser compatibility, alignment with brand guidelines, considered typography, and beautiful touches of design delight are all important, but not yet. At this stage, it’s perfectly okay for your demo to be bootstrapped together with poor code and held together with sticky tape. Test out your ideas with something tactile and throwaway while you have the time and space in a project.
I worked on a project with an intricate checkout flow with layers of conditional logic. Designing small discreet demos to pilot novel interaction ideas helped evaluate and develop our potential solutions. In this case, getting a feel for how something behaved in a browser was the fastest way to try and share new ideas without becoming too attached and committed to any of them.
3. How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?
Until you get into the final phases of delivery, the thinking behind the design is more important than how it looks. Early design sketches are ways of expressing your thinking. The success of your sketches is in helping whoever’s looking at them more easily imagine the final product.
In communicating the thinking behind the designs, I’ll take time to identify who needs to make what decisions and what will help them to do so.
In most projects, you use a variety of channels and formats to share your work in progress. The trick is to use the best channel for the decisions you want made and the situation of the decision-makers. To do this, I start by answering some questions:
- Who is the decision-maker, and what do they need to make a confident decision?
- Is the conversation going to be synchronous or asynchronous? If there’s a choice, what’s my preference?
- What’s the perceived size and implication of the decision being made?
- What type of feedback am I looking for? A firm agreement or a nod to indicate that I’m moving in the right direction?
- How familiar are people with the challenge, and how much context is required?
Your job is to make it easy for the decision-makers to arrive at a timely, informed, and confident conclusion on how to progress.
I’m a big fan of using screen recordings to show work early to get feedback on ideas. They’re quick to produce, easy to distribute, and for the viewer, they are convenient to watch when they have the time and space to do so.
Showing the work and simultaneously sharing the thinking behind it is a potent combination. This approach is especially useful when the design ideas are more radical and when decision-makers benefit from having more time to reflect on and consider the proposed approaches.
I’ve found that keeping videos short and focused on a single design decision is most effective. The recordings don’t need to be Hollywood blockbusters. However, like all good stories, they need to have a beginning, middle, and end. Avoid a tour through the interface. Instead, highlight the problem you’re trying to solve and explain why and how your proposed ideas provide an interesting and impactful solution.
Putting the ink into design thinking
Design can make the abstract concrete. It allows us to play around with and stress-test new ideas. Design enables us to explore possible futures and then bring them to life.
In articulating ideas, look to create just enough to express an idea, to spark a better conversation, and to rapidly investigate alternative (and hopefully radical) options.
I like to think about my work as being a step on the road to confident decision-making. Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this. The value is in the depth of thinking and clarity of communication that comes from creating visuals to share. That’s more important than the quality of the marks on the page.
