iteration
So that you can get feedback on it and make it better
Fascinatingly, one of the other big complaints people had about agile is no iteration. I don't understand how being in an agile environment makes people less iterative, but somehow that seems to be the case. And I think it's because people misunderstand and think that agile is just about putting features out faster, and not about the important part, which is getting something in front of users faster so that you can get feedback on it and make it better.
The most rewarding iterations
Initial designs for sophisticated software applications are invariably complicated, even when developed by competent engineers. Truly good solutions emerge after iterative improvements or after redesigns that exploit new insights, and the most rewarding iterations are those that result in program simplifications.
Evolutions of this kind, however, are extremely rare in current software practice—they require time-consuming thought processes that are rarely rewarded. Instead, software inadequacies are typically corrected by quickly conceived additions that invariably result in the well-known bulk.
To anticipate all the uses and abuses
Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
Building is never a straight line
You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.
Building like this is never a straight line. Ideas and code get left on the cutting room floor because part of innovation is questioning whether what you made should exist. The process is cyclical and iterative, looking something like this.
Between the two spaces
It is widely accepted that creative design is not a matter of first fixing the problem and then searching for a satisfactory solution concept; instead it seems more to be a matter of developing and refining together both the formulation of the problem and ideas for its solution, with constant iteration of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation processes between the two “spaces” – problem and solution.
The game discovering itself
We like to think about this process as the game discovering itself over time. Because as iterators, rather than designers, it’s our job to simply play the game, listen to it, feel it, and kind of feel out what it seems to want to become - and just follow the trails of what’s fun.
Deciding what to design
We Don’t Really Know the Goal When We Start
The most serious model shortcoming is that the designer often has a vague, incompletely specified goal, or primary objective. In such cases, the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.
I came to realize that the most useful service I was performing for my client was helping him decide what he really wanted.
Today, we recognize that rapid prototyping is an essential tool for formulating precise requirements. Not only is the design process iterative; the design-goal-setting process is itself iterative. Knowing complete product requirements up front is a quite rare exception, not the norm. Therefore, goal iteration must be considered an inherent part of the design process.
Embracing the mess
Design is non-linear. At Figma, we often talk about “embracing the mess,” and that really means leaning into the chaos and complexity that makes the design process what it is. Even once you have the seedling of an idea, you need to explore and iterate, then pull back and evaluate to see what’s working and what’s not. Sometimes you’ll scrap an idea after a brainstorm session, and other times you’ll get pretty far with a concept, but still need different perspectives and input to move forward.
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting
An Article by Matt Webb- The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
- Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
- Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
An Article by Erin CasaliGetting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions.
The Design of Design
What's Wrong With This Model?
A ChapterDesign process models: A summary argument
- A formal design process model is needed, to help organize design work, to aid communication in and about projects, and for teaching.
- Having a visual, geometric representation of a design process model is crucial, for designers are spatial thinkers. They will most easily learn, think about, share, and talk in terms of a model with a clear geometric picture.
- The Rational Model of design occurs naturally to engineers.
- The linear, step-by-step Rational Model is highly misleading. It does not reflect what real designers do, or what the best design thinkers identify as the essence of the design process.
- The bad model matters. It has led to the too-early binding of requirements, leading in turn to bloated products and schedule/budget/performance disasters.
- The Rational Model has persisted in practice despite its inadequacies and plenty of cogent critiques. This is because of its seductive logical simplicity, and because builders and clients needs “contracts."
- Several alternative models have been proposed. I find Boehm’s Spiral Model the most promising. We need to keep developing it.
The spiral model
The spiral shape certainly suggests progress. It associates successive repetitions of the same activity. The geometric shape is easily understood and memorable. The model emphasizes prototyping, starting with user-interface prototypes and user testing long before an operational prototype is possible.
Since a development model is principally used by developers, I believe having it designer-centered is entirely appropriate. With Boehm and against Denning and Dragon, I advocate frequent but not continuous interaction with representative users, with successive prototypes as the vehicles.
I strongly believe that way forward is to embrace and develop the Spiral Model.
A grossly obese set of requirements
Who advocates in the requirements process for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, it’s robustness? Often, no one. As often, an architect or engineer who can offer only opinion based on taste and instinct, unbuttressed as yet by facts. For in a classical Waterfall Model product process, requirements are set before design is begun.
The result, of course, is a grossly obese set of requirements, the union of many wish lists, assembled without constraints. Usually, the list is neither prioritized nor weighted. The social forces in the committee forbid the painful conflicts occasioned by even weighting, much less prioritizing.
Requirements proliferation
Any attempt to formulate all possible requirements at the start of a project will fail and would cause considerable delays. — Pahl and Beitz, Engineering Design
As Project Manager, I had to reject the requirements document as totally impractical, and have a quite small team of architects, marketers, and implementers extract the essence.
Requirements proliferation must be fought, by both birth control and infanticide.
The architectural contracting model
It is the necessity for contracts, whether within an organization or between organizations, that forces the too-early binding of goals, requirements, constraints. The pressure for a complete and agreed-upon set of requirements run into the hard fact, that it is essentially impossible to specify any complete and accurate set of requirements for any complex system except in iterative interaction with the design process.
How have the centuries-old building design disciplines handled this perplexity? Fundamentally, by a quite different contracting model.
- The client develops a program, not a specification, for the building.
- He contracts with an architect, usually on an hourly or percentage basis, for services, not for a specified product.
- The architect elicits from the client, the users, and other stakeholders a more complete program, which does not pretend to be a rigid contractable product specification.
- The architect does a conceptual design that approximates the reconciliation of program and the constraints of budget, schedule, and code. This serves as a first prototype, to be conceptually tested by the stakeholders.
- After iteration, the architect performs design development, often producing more detailed drawings, a 3-D scale model, mockups, and so on. After stakeholder iteration, the architect produces construction drawings and specifications.
- The client uses these drawings and specifications to enter into a fixed-price contract for the product.
Notice how this long-evolved model separates the contract for design from the contract for construction. Even when both are performed by the same organization, this separation clarifies many things.
The rational model of design
Engineers seem to have a clear, if usually implicit, model of the process of design. It is usually an orderly model of an orderly process as the engineer conceives it.
The notion that the design process should be modeled as a systematic step-by-step process seems to have first developed in the German mechanical engineering community.
Herbert Simon independently argues for design as a search process in The Sciences of the Artificial. He was motivated to lay out a strictly rational model of design precisely because such a model was a necessary precursor to automating design. His model remains influential even if today we recognize the "wicked problem" of original design as one of the least promising candidates for AI.
In software engineering, Winston Royce independently introduced a seven-step Waterfall Model to bring order to the process. In fact, Royce introduced his waterfall as a straw man that he then argued against, but many people have cited and followed the straw man rather than his more sophisticated models. Even if ironically, Royce's seven-step model must be considered one of the foundational statements of the Rational Model of Design.
Design process models
Any systematization of the design process is a great step forward compared to "Let's just start coding, or building." It:
- Provides clear steps for planning a design project
- Furnishes clearly definable milestones
- Suggests project organization and staffing
- Helps communication within the design team
- Is readily teachable to novices, and tells novices facing their first design assignments where to begin.
The Rational Model in particular brings yet more advantages. The early explicit statement of goals, secondary desiderata, and constraints helps a team avoid wandering, and it breeds team unification on purposes. Planning the whole design process before starting coding or formal drawings avoids many troubles and much wasted effort. Casting the process as a systematic search of a design space broadens the horizon of the individual designers and lifts their eyes far beyond their previous personal experiences.
But the rational model is much too simplistic, even in Simon's richly developed version.
The dual ladder
The first task for growing designers, as opposed to managers, is to craft a proper career path for them, one whose compensation and sociological status reflect their true value to the creative enterprise. This is commonly called the dual ladder. It it easy to give corresponding salaries to corresponding rungs, but it requires strong proactive measures to give them equal prestige: equal offices, equal staff support, reverse-biased raises when duties change.
Why does the dual ladder need special attention? Perhaps because managers, being human, are inherently inclined to consider their own tasks more difficult and important than design and need to deliberately assess what makes creativity and innovation happen.
A platonic ideal
As the architecture design progressed, I observed what at first seemed quite strange. For the architecture team, the real System/360 was the Design Concept itself, a Platonic ideal computer. Those physical and electrical Model 50, Model 60, Model 70, and Model 90 things under construction out on the engineering floors were but Plato’s shadows of the real System/360. The real System/360’s most complete and faithful embodiment was not in silicon, copper, and steel, but in the prose and diagrams of IBM System/360 Principles of Operation, the programmer’s machine language manual.
I had a similar experience with the View/360 beach house. Its Design Concept came to be real long before any construction began. It persisted through many versions of drawings and cardboard models.
The design concept
Is there positive value to recognizing an invisible Design Concept as a real entity in design conversations? I think so.
First, great designs have conceptual integrity—unity, economy, clarity. They not only work, they delight, as Vitruvius first articulated. We use terms such as elegant, clean, beautiful to talk about bridges, sonatas, circuits, bicycles, computers, and iPhones. Recognizing the Design Concept as an entity helps us to seek its integrity in our own solo designs, to work together for it in team designs, and to teach it to our youth.
Second, talking frequently about the Design Concept as such vastly aids communication within a design team. Unity of concept is the goal; it is achieved only by much conversation.
Thus, moviemakers use storyboards to keep their design conversations focused on the Design Concept, rather than on implementation details.
The Idea
The design is thus the mental formulation, which Sayers calls “the Idea,” and it can be complete before any realization is begun. Mozart’s response to his father’s inquiry about an opera due to the duke in three weeks both stuns us and clarifies the concept.
For most human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, “working out,” are essential disciplines for the theoretician.
The boldest decisions
In retrospect, many of the case studies have a striking common attribute: the boldest design decisions, whoever made them, have accounted for a high fraction of the goodness of the outcome. These bold decisions were made due sometimes to vision, sometimes to desperation. They were always gambles, requiring extra investment in hopes of getting a much better result.
Intuition and systems
Systematic design excluding intuition yields pedestrian follow-ons and knock-offs; intuitive design without system yields flawed fancies. How to weld intuition and systematic approach? How to grow as a designer? How to function in a design team?