Design in isolation: a 15-Step Process from an Experienced Solo-Designer
By: Adam R.T. Smith
Tags: User Experience, Covid 19, Design, Independent, Design Process

Designers need Designers. For validation, for criticism, for feedback. To share war stories, to discuss and debate approaches and patterns, and to challenge and inspire each other. No matter how experienced you are, or how great a Designer you may be, there’s really nothing like having Design peers’ perspective.

It’s the same reason we need user research: others see what we don’t, or what we can’t because we’re too close to it. Even experienced Designers, who more frequently catch hiccups and avoid a larger number of experiential pitfalls, can still miss experience shortcomings that are clearly visible to the objective observer — and none are better equipped to be objective observers than true Experience Designers.

Sometimes, every Designer has to be a Solo-Designer, to design in isolation, and this has never been more widely relevant than it is today.

Given how COVID-19, Physical Distancing and self-isolation are impacting absolutely everyone worldwide these past few weeks, and will continue to for the foreseeable future, I thought I might share some things I’ve learned that have helped me be a better Solo-Designer over the years. It won’t help your cabin-fever (or real fever), anxiety, screaming kids, streaming-addiction or boredom, but it might better equip you to create stronger, more thoughtful, effective and successful designs while alone in your home office, cut off from your design peers.

As an Independant Designer myself for nearly 2 decades before my last five years working with teams, I’ve seen more than a few experiential pitfalls manifest in my work while designing in isolation. Whether it be failing to consider edge-cases, designing experiences that unwittingly had negative impacts outside the immediate scope of work, or not understanding the impacts on the design from other experiences outside the scope of work — hell, I would often get too close to the idea, or hold on to an experiential concept that I wasn’t willing to let go of, even in the face of it creating friction in the overall product or service design. As much as I hate to admit it, even Designers are only human, even me.

Not one to accept anything less than the best from myself, and always wanting to outdo my last project, I continuously worked to improve my process, to make up for my self-inflicted design-in-isolation situation. Although nothing can replace peer-review, user research and testing, I’m going to lay out a process that has worked for me while Independant. Hopefully it can help a few designers during the pandemic.

Adam’s 15-Step Additive Design Process For Self-Isolated Designers

Ignore competitors — for now

This may be counterintuitive for some, but If you’re aiming for a truly innovative solution — and let’s admit we always should be — the absolute worst thing you can do is look at what the competition is doing when first starting a new project.

When you learn from others, you learn the bad just as much as you learn the good. It will likely lock you into nothing more than incremental improvement, as you subconsciously adopt the patterns and practices of the in-market solutions. This is the number-one killer of innovation.

Personally, I’ve found that by starting with a blank slate focuses the design on the specific problem at hand, and leads to far more tailored solutions. No distractions, no paradigms or patterns to leverage — what’s the right design in this particular situation? You have no choice but to find it for yourself. Napkin Sketch it

Before you design anything, think through the customer’s process, what their goals and ambitions are, what steps must they absolutely go through with this product or service. What can you simplify, what can you remove, what can you automate? What’s the overall experience you want customers or users to have? What would make them love the experience?

Now get drawing. Sketch the entire happy-path, and only the happy path, experience as a series of boxes and arrows or a rough wireflow, that part’s up to you. But whichever you choose, do it in pencil on paper, and don’t hesitate to scratch things out, take notes, and question yourself. Always question yourself — you don’t have the luxury of a peer to do it for you.

Don’t try to make things look good, accurate, or even realistic at this point. This is your first cut and is meant to be thrown out. The best thing you can aim for at this stage is to get your bad ideas and your half baked, boring or ineffective solutions on paper and out of the way as early as possible. If the challenge or project is big enough, throw out the paper and start over. This forces your mind to rethink what you previously put down while maintaining the general idea. Don’t worry — your brain won’t generally let you forget your really good ideas from the original sketch.

Do not touch a computer yet. There are significant cognitive and emotional attachments to work committed and “saved” on a computer as opposed to doodled on paper. This sounds like a small thing, something you can easily ignore or discard. Don’t underestimate the power of paper and pencil. Or alliteration apparently. Pick Your Hero Moments & Draw them with care

Once you’ve sketched out the high-level experience, pick three to five hero moments across the entire experience, depending on the scope of your experience, and sketch them in detail and with care. You don’t have to be an artist, or a visual designer, but take your time — enjoy it, and still keep it on paper.

The hero moments should jump out at you. They’re the screens, states or transactions that you feel set the tone, the character and personality of your concept, and are usually the ones I just have to get down on paper. These hero moments will act as the tent poles of your design, the skeleton that will tie all other screens, states or transactions together. For now, don’t worry about the consistency of the patterns used across the sketches — use a dropdown on one screen, and flyouts on another. Do what is most appropriate for that hero moment to make it the most awesome it can be. There will be plenty of time to homogenize your design patterns later.

While you’re sketching, try to include detailed design elements, shade in contrasting areas or even use colour them in if you want. Draw your typography and even write out the directional copy for the titles and headers (use lines for body copy though or you’ll be there all day). Again, take your time with the details. I’ve found that when the mind goes into automatic-mode while performing activities like shading or getting the shape of the font right — this is when the subconscious can connect with the conscious, and you begin to notice issues and / or come up with entirely new, innovative ways to solve the same problems. Map it

Take your napkin sketch and your hero moments, and map out the entire experience — preferably with pencil and paper again, but whiteboards are also a great medium. Generally I would use a wireflow at this point, with the fidelity depending heavily on the complexity. Higher fidelity for less complex projects, and very low fidelity for higher complexity projects. It’s an inverted scale, but you can find the right balance of time and effort that suits your needs and style. All that matters is you get the entire thing down in some logical format, capturing not just the essence and personality but the logic and flow.

Try to capture each screen element, every button, link, alert or interaction at this point to the best of your ability. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it helps to be as comprehensive as possible at this point. Use this as an exploration exercise. Let each screen you draw show you the next screens, choices and branches the experience demands. Don’t force the flow, let the flow expose itself.

One thing I find very useful in this stage is a change of scenery. For me, this would usually mean a coffee shop, but that’s simply not an option thanks to the ‘VID. Try your backyard if you have a patio table, or the basement, or on the floor. Just do it somewhere different from where you normally work. Changing your environment can be an effective way to force your brain to look at things differently, as the stimuli you expose yourself to change, so does your perspective. Walk away from it

This is the hardest to do, especially with the deadlines and timelines we are given or create for ourselves. Do yourself a favour, put the pencil down, close the sketchbook, walk away from it and don’t look back. For a while anyway.

The duration is up to you, and can depend on the complexity of the work as well. It can be 2 to 5 days. Anything less than 24 hours is too little, and won’t give your subconscious enough time to make connections in your work that your conscious mind can’t see. Anything more than 5 days, and well, besides missing your deadlines you might actually forget more than you remember about the in-betweens, and the reasons and meanings behind some of the concepts in your work.

Find the time away that works for you. Read a book, draw for fun, go for a bike ride. This is what works for me, you’ll need to find what works for you, but whatever it is step away so you can come back fresh and tackle the problem with fresh eyes and a clear mind. Stepping away can give you just enough distance from the work that it can simulate the benefits of a design peer-review. Taking a day or two away can be expensive, but it is cheaper than hiring another designer. Write it

Wait, write? But, I’m a designer and writing is another person’s job. No, that’s actually very far from the truth, but that’s another story for another day.

There are two effective ways to “write” your experience: as a “functional description” and as a “story”. Although each method is inherently better suited to particular types of projects, both can actually be used interchangeably.

A Functional Description takes every action a user can take and interaction they experience on a given page, state or transaction and describes it in paragraph form. I usually start each paragraph with something like “A user can…” or “the system presents…”, but I try to mix it up, otherwise this can get very, very boring. The Functional Description is usually very beneficial for transaction-heavy applications or experiences, as it forces you to really think through the cause and effect of user and system actions. It is also extremely powerful at identifying edge-cases and non-happy path experiences because it really makes you think about the flow in a very detailed, albeit different manner than you would when drawing out the experiences in flows or wireframes.

Writing a story is more high-level, but it can really help tie your hero moments together into a cohesive, smooth experience. The story is generally also written from the users perspective, and describes the overarching experience, touching on the screens, states or transactions as anchors in your story. I’ve also found that writing an experience as a story can be a very effective tool in surfacing the personality of your product or service as it becomes a character in your story. This may sound hokey — but try it. It works.

Whichever you choose, writing out your experience is very effective and makes you think about your design from a users perspective and the shifting of mental modes in your own brain from design to writing can actually replicate some of the benefits of having a design peer-review your work. It’s not the same, but it definitely helps. I still do this even when I do have peers to review my work because it let’s me see experiences from multiple angles. Research Competitors

Ok, now that you’ve solidified your own approach and concept, tailored to the specific needs of your client, the problem and the user, you’re ready to expose yourself to what competing products and services are doing in the space. With your hero moments, experience map and stories documented, when you look at the competition you’ll look at the other experiences in comparison to yours, not as a guide for what should be done.

The most important thing here is to be as objective as possible. You will have done some things better than what’s out there, but there will be experiences, patterns and concepts out in the wild that are better, more effective and / or more efficient than yours. You can either borrow the “best practices” and incorporate it into your work, or use them as inspiration to create something better than both your concept and their patterns combined. Whichever you choose, it’s about crafting the best experience for your users. You decide how you want to go about it.

Think of the competing experiences as yet another design-peer-review. If you’re anything like me, you appreciate the feedback, consider it holistically, and take only what you think will work in the greater context of the whole product or service. Feedback, or in this case best practices, do not always have to be followed, just considered. Research Adjacent Industries

This is my favourite type of research. Abstracting concepts, patterns and models from non-competing, even drastically different products and services from different industries for comparison and inspiration is exciting, and can have dramatic effects on your work.

You don’t need to look for products and services that have similar capabilities or functionality. It could be a personality, a character or a feeling, or the way that the product or service makes the complex simple. It could be something as simple as an aspect of the product or service that makes you say “ooh, I like that…”. Armed with your sketches, hero moments, wireflows and write ups and competitor research — you should quickly be able to identify the gems that would augment your work. At this point there shouldn’t be too many, so don’t worry if you can’t find any — that’s probably a sign that you’ve already come up with the best experience model you can for this project.

Looking to successful solutions in very different markets with very different purposes and reimagining them in the context of your product or service is a powerful way to get a fresh perspective — and, again, get a semblance of what a design peer might offer in terms of feedback, inspiration or recommendations. Draw it again — all together now

Ok, this one’s important. Take everything you’ve learned, and redraw your wireflows from beginning to end, again with a more informed questioning eye. Don’t just copy your previous work, reinvent it as you go and stick to pencil and paper for this step. You’ll be committing (very intentional use of wording) to pixel in the next step. This may be your last chance to truly reinvent your experience, so take advantage of it while you can.

Can you simplify it further? Are there opportunities to reduce steps or effort on behalf of the user? Can you help the user understand what’s expected of them earlier? Where can you sprinkle in some delight? Wireframe Happy Path

Crack open your computer and favourite wireframing app. I know, I know — we’re at step 10 and this is the first time we’re using a computer? Yes. Yes it is. Isn’t this way too late in the process? No. No it isn’t.

Wireframe the entire happy-path digitally. While you’re at it, recursively look at the design and interaction patterns you are using, and try to homogenize them across screens and states. Begin to set standards, but that’s inherent with digital design, as it allows you to copy components from previous screens you’ve created . At this stage, copying and modifying is actually beneficial as it helps to create consistency across the experience you’ve designed from end to end because you can understand the use of each pattern in the context of its use. Whereas when you copy and modify too early, the simplicity of the action enforces replication rather than design, and limits and constricts the process before you have a complete view of your experience.

This is the third time you’re mapping out your experience in detail, and is in essence your third iteration. Because you are committing this to file, make sure you’re happy with it. As mentioned previously, when you take the action of saving something, it becomes much, much harder to question, dispute or change. In fact most of us will actually form an emotional bond to the design, and fight for it even when provided valuable and insightful feedback, even in the face of user testing. This is why I spend so much time with paper and pencil. I am far more willing to toss a sketch than I am to delete a file. Prototype it

Prototypes are as much for you, the Designer, as they are to illustrate the experience to clients, and establish an effective means to support user testing.

You don’t truly see the gaps in an experience until you use it, and linking your wireframes together in a prototype really is the easiest way to surface things you missed, identify inconsistencies in experience, and where users could run into roadblocks.

No need to go into detail on prototyping — just build it and play with it. This too will give you an alternate perspective on your design. Wireframe non-happy paths & edge cases

Hammered out all the inconsistencies, gremlins and roadblocks in the happy-path? Great. Now wireframe the edge cases, error states and non-happy-paths.

Straightforward. Test it, early & often

Testing is more challenging in isolation, but it’s not impossible. There are online services and tools like UserZoom that are made for this. Personally, I’ve found screensharing while a remote participant speaks aloud while using your prototype to be a perfectly good mechanism for acquiring qualitative feedback.

Test as early as possible (which is always before you think it’s ready to test), and test with as many people as possible, preferably actual customers. Design it

Whether you’re the Visual Designer, or whether you’re passing the work on to a another Designer, the visual design pass will bring a whole new translation to the experience — which is exactly what we’ve been doing in the 13 steps that preceded this one.

If you’re a hybrid and crafting the design yourself, you probably made a number of early design decisions while wireframing. Try to take a fresh look when layering in the final visual design; the shift in purpose and intent from UX to Visual Design should yet again allow you to look at your work from a new perspective.

If you’re working with a dedicated Visual Designer, you need to work closely with them, and ensure their work is staying true to the experience you designed. However, you also need to remain completely open to the Visual Designer’s interpretations of your work. In many cases, the final incarnation will be even better than what you had originally designed. Not because the Visual Designer is better than you, but because you iterated on the initial UX design through pencil and pixel to the point where what you handed them was basically an alley-oop. Measure it

If you don’t learn from your work, you can never truly improve it. If you can, track the KPIs of your experience for 6 months or more, this will allow the experience honeymoon to wear off for users as they are initially exposed to the changes and get to the real, day-in-day-out results.

You can’t deny the truth of statistics and measurements, and this is the most important perspective there is: the market.

Each of the 15 steps in this process are about looking at your work from multiple perspectives. The intent is to give yourself the opportunity to see issues and opportunities you might not have been able to if you only saw your work from one or two. This process worked for me while working independantly for almost 20 years, and I still leveraged them while working on large design teams in addition to regular peer-reviews.

I didn’t always have the luxury to execute each step on every project, but each one you use improves your work because it gives you a new perspective, so don’t feel that you have to do all 15. It’s important though that if you do add more than one, you add them in the order described. I’ve tried mixing the order up, but you just don’t get the same results.

If you’re stuck at home during the ‘VID, try adding one or two to your own process if you’re missing design peer-reviews. Even if you aren’t, give them a try to give yourself the opportunity to see your work from a different light. Hopefully they can help you as much as they’ve helped me over the years… or decades (sigh).

Stay inside. Stay healthy. Stay safe.