Model of the World
I’ve been on a quest for the simplest model that describes design and what it’s for. I mean, the model that I can scribble up on the board, and everyone gets it. Over the years, my models have gotten smaller, with fewer parts and less to explain.
Here’s my current model of the world:
It may not be self-explanatory, sadly, so here’s the two-second version:
- Consumer Research tells us about people.
- Design Criteria are those things that tell us what consumers care about in a product/service/whatever. They are the levers we can play with to adjust purchase intent; they define what a “good” experience is, etc.
- Design Tactics are the specific design attributes we’ll create to meet those criteria.
- Design Realization is the process of designing the product.
I like this model because it gives real weight to the middle two features: Design Criteria and Design Tactics. Many projects attempt to jump from “We have done a lot of Design Research” right into “Let’s Realize the Product/Service/Whatever.” They do this without understanding what pieces of the research are actually the Criteria and which are just facts about the consumer, nor do they spend enough time developing the ways to meet those Criteria with appropriate Tactics.
Products that jump over the criteria-tactics stages are hard because not everything we learn about a consumer is relevant to a particular design problem. It’s very easy to learn a lot about consumers: you just watch them and ask them and survey them. The hard part is filtering the information and making the connections between the relevant bits to construct good theories about what consumers are really looking for. And then testing and proving the theories before plunging in and building.
Design isn’t magic. If it was, I couldn’t draw a picture of it.
