Eat, Sleep, Pray, Iterate.
You know what they say–“Iterate. Iterate. Iterate”. It’s one of the phases in human-centered design, a creative approach to problem-solving that learns directly from users and promises innovative solutions, tailor-made to their needs. The idea is to go through a loop of listening to feedback, building prototypes, and testing until you can fine-tune a solution. You do this before an expensive build and launch. “Fail early to succeed sooner.”
The problem is, as designers, we can get caught up in our own loop. Obsessed with details that don’t always make a huge impact–we get married to a problem that doesn’t merit our time. We fall into a sunk cost fallacy, making irrational decisions. “We might as well keep working on this project because we’ve already invested so much in it.”
But this is not all the designer’s fault. This is a symptom of being left out of the talks where the big picture is defined. So we end up not knowing how the road map looks, what the end goal is. Without that information, we can’t measure how important a specific feature is and on our quest for excellence, we could end up spending too much time on something trivial and not focusing on what has a greater significance.
Yes. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate. But do it with the right knowledge in hand.
The Design Team
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By Pablo Stanley
Read Next: Design Disruptor
Read Previous: The Onboard-a-Buddy
Thanks to Courtney M. Sawyer, Ugur Kaner, Adam Ruf, Edgar chaparro, Frances Tung, Luisa Mancera, Adam Treister for all their support.
