Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Emma Townley-Smith

In design school, they teach you to look for what I call “Level 1” design problems. As you’re learning the design process, these are the most common critiques you’ll see leveled at junior teams:

Not getting “deep enough” in interviews
When you haven’t found an insight, it’s often blamed on not getting deep enough. Not connecting with people emotionally, or not building good enough rapport to get to the underlying implicit needs. Rushing into the hard questions without letting your participant get comfortable (and then getting surface-level answers) is common when you’re learning to interview.
Not making enough room for creativity
People new to design often have a hard time staying open-minded in brainstorming sessions and allowing themselves to come up with wild ideas. “Too narrow of a brainstorm” is one of the first conclusions people jump to when it feels like your ideas aren’t innovative.
Too focused on one idea
When you’ve been deep in the design work for a while, it’s easy to get blinders and focus on one idea regardless of the feedback it receives. When you feel like this idea is “it,” it can be hard to let that go.

These problems probably sound familiar. Avoiding Level 1 Problems helps you build confidence in basic design process principles. Build empathy, get out of your creative box, and don’t go down the first rabbit-hole you encounter. But after a couple years of using these blunt tools for critique, something doesn’t feel right.

For example — if you’re still not finding an insight, but you feel like you are getting deep enough in participant interviews… then what? It’s easy to get stuck checking off the “Level 1” boxes, and not recognizing the problems that might be lurking underneath that basic framework.

Each of these problems goes a level deeper, but they get harder to bring up in conversation. The problems are more nuanced, and don’t fit the design school process critique boxes anymore. It’s time to talk about Level 2 Problems.

Not getting “deep enough” => Wrong questions (or no questions at all)
The early part of the design process is fuzzy, but your plan for today’s interview doesn’t have to be. If you don’t have a learning agenda, it will be hard to find answers no matter how good your rapport is. Establish your questions early, and review them with the team so you know what to probe for. Make sure you have some questions targeted where you think the problems are for the user — even if you’re wrong and follow another path in the conversation, it’s important to note where your thinking has been challenged.
Not enough room for creativity => Not enough constraints
Sometimes the team needs to get wild… but sometimes they just need to get specific. “How might we start a new business?” leaves plenty of room for creativity, but would lead to lots of broad, vague business ideas. “How might we start a new food business to help busy, health-conscious people?” is much more narrow, but also more likely to lead to concrete ideas a team could act upon. Constraints are a powerful motivator for creativity.
Another way to look at the “need more constraints” problem is to consider your team’s other goals. For example, beyond creating a new business, you may want to: improve the public image of your company or team, experiment with new tech, or create a new revenue stream. It’s hard to optimize toward a single metric or a single goal — knowing that this solution also needs to create new revenue, or generate positive PR, can help.
Too focused on a single idea => Testing a whole concept instead of a key hypothesis
As a designer, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the end to end experience of a concept. You don’t want to think only about your new health food product, but about how it might be discovered, packaged, delivered, and shared over time. Putting all that out in front of people (whether it’s users or stakeholders) can be overwhelming, especially when you haven’t begun to validate it.
If it feels like your team is too focused on the details of a single idea, take a step back and think about what key hypothesis the idea is putting out into the world.
In the example of a food business, your key hypothesis probably isn’t that people want a different sort of packaging. It’s probably something closer to: Health-conscious foodies are unsatisfied with their current on-the-go snacks. Create a prototype that can help test that hypothesis, and you’ll be able to move forward — even if the user experience isn’t much like your original idea.

Being able to articulate process challenges will make you a better designer, and help bring other teammates into the fold of the design process. It’s time to put your “5 Whys” to work… on your own design critiques.

How to level up your design process critique was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to level up your design process critique

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