When Designers Don't Agree

Six guidelines to follow if you see a different way to solve a design problem

“Too many chefs spoil the soup” is an apt proverb for describing the tension that can arise in large-scale creative team collaboration. How do sizable design departments reconcile the individual vision and innate sense of style that creative people possess, when conflicts in personal taste and execution threaten to spoil the soup? Even with the advent of design systems, ‘the way you designed it’ isn’t always the same as ‘the way I would have designed it’ and if patience runs in short supply, opinions can flare — costing time for design teams and testing relationships with heated discourse.

So what do you do if you find yourself dismantling a colleague’s design solution, because you think your approach could be better, even with collaborative design team critiques and reviews? First, take a deep breath … then follow these guidelines to the letter. (Your manager will thank you for it.) These best practices preserve trust and respect — essential ingredients for any functional group — and you’ll notice themes including respecting your fellow designers, assuming personal responsibility, and exhibiting grace, humility, maturity, and collaborative spirit.

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The UX Process: A Fractal Model

The User Experience Design process is complex and organic, and — like so many problems UX professionals encounter — challenging to express in simple terms.

Most visual models of the UX process push boxes and arrows to the limit in a struggle to capture the iterative and collaborative nature of the enterprise design progression. The video below, which is my latest UX process visualization, breaks free from Euclidean convention in leveraging Fractal geometry — in a storytelling capacity — to describe the UX process at scale. 

View fullscreen for best experience, and read on for more content once you've viewed!

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Now that you've seen the video, read on for more on how the model can be used to foster non-designer stakeholder buy-in, or map a design practice's resourcing strategy. Plus — I’ve postscripted more fascinating (and nerdy!) information on other triangle models that inspired my design choice.
 

Using the fractal UX model to educate non-designer stakeholders on process

The fractal model’s first iteration illustrates how non-designer stakeholders can be unaware of the process behind good product design. If an executive, customer, or cross-departmental partner is only exposed to finished design work product above the ‘waterline,' the realization of time and resource investment in the process section can blindside them like the iceberg and the Titanic.

Any enterprise design practice struggling for buy-in on the ROI of UX investment could potentially benefit from providing process visibility to an executive champion at strategic checkpoints along the way. 

Using the fractal model to map design department staffing and resourcing

Design practices can staff vertically by hiring full-stack or generalist designers, who handle a product or feature through parts of the pyramid from research to visual design.

Alternatively, departments can staff horizontally with specialists to leverage deep expertise across areas like user research, rapid prototyping, or advanced UI design and systems design. 

Design organizations may also leverage a mixed model, with horizontal research expertise at the bottom of the pyramid, or UI-only specialists staffing toward the top.

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Inspiration

Fractals, Jurassic Park, and the Sierpinski Triangle

In conceiving this model, I sketched through many other shapes, including circles, hexagons, and even literal iceberg illustrations. Ultimately — the model benefits from the strength, simplicity and stability inherent in a triangle, plus the mystique and mythology of the pyramid.

I first learned about fractals when reading Michael Chrichton’s Jurassic Park as a young adult, and was fascinated by the idea of alternative geometries. Fractals are a recent mathematics field, developed in the 1970’s and described as “a process of successive approximation: a problem-solving method where a succession of approximations, each building on the one preceding, is used to achieve a desired degree of accuracy.” UX Process could be described by the same description, almost word-for-word.

The Sierpinski Triangle is considered a mathematically “attractive fixed set,” but it's attractive in the aesthetic sense, too. Fractals are deeply compelling as a framework for UX in the way they capsule the medium of time — iterations, keyframes, successive slices — as an aspect of the geometry itself. And as we know, time is a critical element to be managed in the UX process.

Pyramidia and the Eye of Providence

As designers, the satisfaction of witnessing your work product succeed from concept to release can only be described as sacred. The UX fractal hints at this sentiment with the capstone/release section of the diagram.

In the physical world, a pyramidion is the granite capstone of a pyramid or obelisk, consecrated by the ancient Egyptians and thought to be covered in gold leaf. According to Wikipedia, very few pyramidia have survived into modern times, and I like how this rarity hints that good product design is not often realized.

Good product design yields marketplace success, so the Eye of Providence relates appropriately as inspiration here as well. You may recognize this symbol as the pyramidion shown on the reverse of a United States $1 bill. The Eye of Providence represents the eye of God watching over humanity, and is associated with light and glory.

Maslow’s Hierarchy

Like pyramidia and the Eye of Providence, Maslow’s Hierarchy of human needs places the ultimate at the top: self-actualization, built on successive layers of physical and psychological needs. This classic model is basic, and succinct psychological theory. I found it to be great related inspiration, since the best UX professionals are also students of behavioral psychology and the human condition.

The Triforce

I’ve been a gamer all of my life and a loyal fan to the Legend of Zelda title series, and often compared the cross-functional triad of design, product and engineering to the power of the Triforce. In the Zelda universe, the Triforce is a divine artifact forged by the three goddesses who created Hyrule. The three sections of the Triforce separate into the Triforce of Power, the Triforce of Wisdom, and the Triforce of Courage. When united, the wielder of the Triforce can use it to make and fulfill as as many wishes as they want.

In product design — when a colocated team of a product, design and engineering lead come together with trust, mutual respect, talent and intent — the experience of being part of that team, and their work result and productivity, can feel truly incredible. Anything’s possible with the a balanced unity of power with the team.

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Check out more of my design work on my site and on Behance.

Portfolio Retro: My interview with Karim Rashid

In 2008, halfway through my first year as an M.F.A. graduate student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, the school engaged award-winning industrial designer Karim Rashid to give a lecture. This turned out to be a highly formative moment in my professional development. Rashid was fiercely eccentric — outfitted in pure white with tattoos and large glasses — and a magnetic speaker, dazzling us with the fluid morphic shapes and electric colors of his product design portfolio. I’d never seen someone so passionate or outspoken in the design community, with such a tall point of view and an agenda about the power of design, and I soaked up the message of his manifesto like a sponge.

“When I design something, I want it to make your life better.” — Karim on his Kone handheld vacuum design for Dirt Devil

“Every business should be completely concerned with beauty - it is after all a collective human need. …  Design is about the betterment of our lives poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally. My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, and to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, kitsch and the meaningless.” — Karim Rashid's Karimanifesto

At the time of Rashid’s talk, I'd recently resigned my first job designing layouts for an Atlanta weekly newspaper to attend graduate school at SCAD. I’d earned a bachelors in journalism a few years before, though, and to keep writing skills sharp, I published the occasional freelance article for the paper during my time there. When I heard Karim was coming to SCAD-Atlanta, I rang up one of the editors I'd worked with to offer a profile piece. Happily, she commissioned the work, which meant I could request a one-on-one interview with Rashid as an official member of the media.

I was scheduled to meet Karim the morning after his SCAD presentation at the Four Seasons lobby for 30 minutes of questioning. Rashid appeared a few minutes late, but promptly sent his SCAD staff escort to fetch coffee so we could speak sans moderator. This was the first of many gestures made over the hour we ended up talking to channel his full attention on the interview and wield maximum influence. Up close, Karim was as charismatic and articulate as he was in front the student crowd. As focused professionals are so capable of, he turned the tables on my questioning, answering questions with a question and pushing me on what I thought design was, and how it could be used, and what this meant for people.

Ultimately, I learned more about myself than him. Looking back on the experience, I think this may have been his goal for the interview, above and beyond exposing his own accomplishments for the benefit of the press. 

Below is my full published piece for The Sunday Paper, which reflects a certain amount of charmed student enthusiasm. But ten years later, I’m still inspired by Karim’s philosophy. He advocates that our energy is best spent focused on the present day and moment, and that we release ourselves from looking backward and staying influenced or caught up in modes of the past. In his presentation, Karim emphasized that he considers none of his work to be ‘futuristic’ — it’s actually ‘right now’ or ‘present,’ but seems futuristic to others because it is devoid of influence from pre-existing aesthetics (unlike everything else we find around us). His point of view can be leveraged not just for design practice purposes, but as a personal outlook on life. Karim achieves true originality, a deceptively difficult yet worthy feat for any designer. 

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Check out more of my design and writing work for The Sunday Paper on Behance.