Design without Process, or the Form Factor Trap

Behind the visual part of any digital product there is a conceptual idea. But what to do if there is not enough time to test this idea? Is it possible to start drawing the visual if the main value for the user has not yet been determined?

Throughout my career – and I've worked in graphic design, product, and consulting – I've heard the same complaint over and over again, not just about myself, but also about colleagues in related departments:

“This will take too long. When will we be able to see the finished result?”

This is always a bit annoying. At such moments, I get angry not only at the interlocutor – and this is often a stakeholder – but also at myself, because I was the one who failed to change his perception of design as a stage of production to the perception of design (including UX research) as a process.

Like many other fields (e.g. product management), design is like an iceberg: the simplicity of the end result hides the complexity of the work. In order for the result to be useful, it is important to collect all the details and weed out those that do not affect the end result. This is a key part of the designer's work.

Design is also often associated only with the final product or solution, because the preparatory work is not visible (and again, product management is a good example). This leads to incorrect generalizations – “product managers are always creating Roadmaps and creating tickets in Jira”, and “designers only draw design layouts”.

If we move the designer's role to such a simplified plane, it means that the rigor of the design process has weakened. After all, only a very small part of it is devoted to working out the visual component, and when teams abandon the tools for working out the concept, they fall into the trap of the form factor.

The road to the form factor trap is paved with optimization

The idea of ​​defining the value of a design through its end result is clear: business is used to measuring everything, but design is difficult measure without results. The more results, the higher the value. The faster they appear, the faster this value goes through the development cycle and reaches the client.

Managers always want to move quickly to “tangible” results that can be seen and assessed. Everything that comes before – they strive to optimize or simply reduce. This is the very part of the process that “takes too much time” and seems unimportant: why is it needed if the designers will still deliver the finished design without it?

But the thing is, this part of the process serves an important function: it makes the difference between creating an app and creating something that only looks like an app.

This is where the form factor trap is hidden, which is triggered the moment a strict design process is abandoned.

Consider the average product. It usually has a dashboard, a single source of truth, a one-stop shop for getting and working with information. We’ve been building dashboards like this for half a century — first as hardware, then as software. The scheme is so universal that stakeholders choose it by default.

Designers have come up with their own tricks to avoid becoming hostages of this vicious circle. Lorem Ipsum allows you to layout content. Design systems offer a set of widgets for creating dashboard layouts. There is AI trained on templates that can transfer layouts to HTML and make them Pixel Perfect.

And so in the end we get a beautiful, but not fully thought out dashboard. The user cannot get relevant information to perform this or that action at the right moment, because we have shortened the part of the process that answered the important question: “What does this mean and how do we know that we are doing everything right?”

Ready-made visual artifacts are not the same as ready-made design

In the short term, the skill of drawing the perfect visual without testing the conceptual idea on users can be useful. But in the long run, we sacrifice the important essence that makes design valuable.

The value of design is not in the creation of visual artifacts, but in the process of using them. Visually displaying design decisions to a specific audience makes them measurable—they can be tested. Continuous feedback between design decisions, their visual display, and the audience, and the refinement of both the concept and the artifacts themselves—that’s how real design works.

This process breaks down when only a stakeholder decides what the designer should do. Then the value disappears. It’s not that someone is wrong (mistakes are part of the process), but that the input data is incomplete.

Incomplete data leads to incomplete results. The visual part of such a solution will be well done, but conceptually it will be empty – at first glance, such services look like the product of a full design cycle, but in fact they do not carry any meaningful information, because the important decisions they should reflect were never made.

The design process is how the team defines the scope of the task and sets the quality standards for the final product. Rigor is important here, otherwise the design team will not be able to determine whether a particular artifact meets its goals or not. Taking a shortcut and immediately giving the business the result can achieve the opposite effect: such a design will not bring benefit to the audience, but what is worse, the problem will be difficult to recognize and solve.

Neither optimization, nor super tools, nor the skill of designers will help the team get out of this trap. The faster the final product gets to the stakeholders, and the more beautiful it is, the more they are convinced that everything is going right, and that the very value has been achieved.

But it’s not all bad — there is a way out. Investing in the design process can help break this vicious circle and break the spell of the form factor trap. This requires continuous data collection on the usefulness and value of design decisions and the application of this data to product design and development.

Empathy for users, empathy for colleagues

There is a common belief in UX that conflict between the design department and other departments is inevitable because designers are the ones who protect the user's interests the most. They have empathy, and everyone else is just greedy capitalists.

This point of view is wrong and unproductive. Designers are not born more insightful and empathetic, and they are not the only ones who “look for the best solutions for the client” – everyone in business strives for this. This is also the basis of the Agile method – to make a ready-made solution faster to ensure its value. Programmers have been working according to it since the times when the word “design” in custom development flashed only when mentioning the principle Big Design Up Front.

Many of our colleagues get more satisfaction from their work when they see that their work improves someone’s life, rather than when they simply close tasks. As design methods have evolved, designers have become involved in the product development process earlier. Their simple methods for testing ideas are faster than the traditional build-measure-learn chain. And now designers are the first to recognize when a product doesn’t add value to the user. But they are also the first to be blamed.

The hard line of “only I know what the user needs” worked for Steve Jobs and almost no one else. Since we all want what’s best for the client and the user, we can take a different approach. Through the design process, teams will see the flaws in their ideas and, together, figure out how to connect the end result to the value they’ve built in.

A product team that has at least some degree of customization of the design process already has a good defense against the form factor trap. This is because they do not force their ideas into the form factor and do not outsource important questions like “what is the benefit?” Instead, such teams start with the goal and answer the question “what do we want to achieve?” run their ideas through the filter “how will this help achieve the goal?”

This approach is already very effective in itself. With it, teams can not only measure the effectiveness of their solution before the release, but also check their understanding of the problem or task before they start solving it.

But there's something else that the design process can do to combat the form factor trap: core user value. Design methods can help your team figure it out, and more importantly, realize that you haven't figured it out yet.

Don't come up with solutions – think about the main benefits for the user first

Understanding that everyone sees the problem in the same light is a critical step in building a good product, but it’s not the only one. I’ve worked with many teams that, while they agreed on the problem, couldn’t agree on a solution. Long conversations about prioritization often ended with a management decision — status in the company won out, not a better understanding of user needs.

But a common vision of the problem does not always help to find a way to solve it – there are so many of them that it is impossible to test each one. Therefore, the main value for the user is in the intermediate stage between identifying the problem and solving it. This is a kind of bridge that prevents attempts to compare warm with red.

In the picture above, we see an example of a strategic pyramid for a hypothetical online store, where they decided to add a news feed. The main benefit for the user here is that the feed helps to search for products faster. But there are solutions that can cope with this task better – for example, a regular search bar or recommendation algorithms. But the point here is that the team has already identified the main benefit for the user and now will not get bogged down in disputes about what is more important – a news feed or a discount system. Both features can be a solution for the same business task (increasing the volume of orders), but they give the user different benefits, and therefore they cannot be compared.

Focusing on user value helps save time and money. Instead of jumping into developing different features to test hypotheses, the team can first cheap and fast determine whether these features will solve the user's problem. If yes, then we are on the right track. And now you can stop wasting time on endless lists of features and immediately focus on the value proposition for the user.

But the design process is not only rewarding when we successfully identify value for the user. Failures are also important, when we fail to find value and realize that we need to slow down.

One of my favorite questions in design is, “What other ways can we create value for the user?” A designer who has conceptualized their solution well will not only be able to immediately list similar ones, but also explain why they rejected them in favor of a better option.

Earlier in the text, we talked about a dashboard with a well-thought-out visual and an ill-thought-out concept. It is precisely this that does not provide any obvious value to the user. We will be told: “But the user will have a dashboard!” The problem is that such a definition of value indicates its absence. This concept is clearly not ready – to understand this, it does not even need to be implemented and tested.

But if you ask the UI design team to “be flexible” and immediately draw a concept without working through the ideas, the result will create a false impression of completeness: the finished visual part will hide the absence of the main thing – value for the user. Such decisions are misleading and point out gaps in the design process.

You don't have to be a designer or think like a designer to use the principles of the approach I've described. But if your role in product development goes before the design stage, and you suddenly realize that the team hasn't identified the core value for the user, then you can effectively shift the process from “designers are slowing us down again” to “designers will definitely help us figure this out.”

P.S. We are interested to know how things are with the design process in your teams. Write in the comments what you think about the form factor trap, and whether there are other ways to get around it – let's discuss this topic.

And we also invite everyone interested in the product approach to watch the podcast from AGIMA and ONY. We invite great digital experts there to discuss product design, analytics, metrics, and just talk about life and work in the product.

IN In the first episode we spoke with Oleg RudakovHead of Data Scientist at a major FMCG company, and soon we will discuss hiring product managers and product strategies with Pavel Aksenov, ex CPO at Samolet Plus. Follow the announcements of releases in our Telegram channel.