Balance biases to reduce their impact

Our brains are conditioned over our entire lives to shortcut to ideas and actions. We all have these biases, and for the most part they. Designers seem to have loads. In mockups it might be defaulting to English names, which are shorter and without accents. It might be thinking everyone has perfect and full colour vision, and will find it easy to read all our low contrast grey labels. If we don't realise we have these biases, they will invisibly guide our thoughts and actions to create inferior products. If we can surface them early and often in the design process though, we can find ways to balance them, and create better, more inclusive solutions in the product.

Minimise blindspots by involving others earlier

Everyone working on the product has a different perspective of the problem, and each perspective has blindspots. The longer design work is siloed and ignores these other perspectives, the harder it is to let go of an idea, and guarantees a limited outcome. Actively pulling in other perspectives early helps minimise this problem, reduces wasted work, and strengthens the outcome.

Validate assumptions before they feel like facts

Every project is layered with assumptions — the problem we think we're solving, why we think it's important to solve for users, how we think they'll use it. The list is endless, and when these assumptions go unchecked, the decisions we make on them aren't rooted in reality. Turned into questions though, we have a way to find out if our assumptions are true or not. Having this clearer understanding in a project helps us make much better design decisions because they are based in reality, and ultimately helps us ship value to our users.

Choose clear over clever

Maybe one of the most enduring problems is Design is creating for other designers instead of your users. The context of the real world our product is used in is noisy and mentally taxing — People have deadlines, need to juggle meetings, pick priorities and focus, and don't have time to pour over every aspect of our product. Choosing to be clear in how we solve problems is being mindful of the noisy real world context Qwilr sits in, and respects the time in our users day they need us to get something done.

Create invisible opinions, not invisible walls

What we choose to solve with our features (and often what we specifically choose not to solve), the way our features afford certain outcomes, the scope of the possible outcome—all these decisions result in a direction and an opinion threaded throughout the product. The trouble is, when these opinions manifest without explanation or against the grain of user's expectation, it just feels like walking into invisible walls, and frustrates instead of helping.

Lastly, remember to look up from the work

Working on challenging problems can often encourage people to go deeper into them, so they can be fully immersed in the details. While having a good detail lens is necessary to execute any idea well, using this view only is like navigating the world with only a magnifying glass. Without looking up regularly, we miss the broader context of where we are at with our work, and if we're still making valuable design decisions.