Making Messy Design
 Clear

Yes, it's the daily sprint.

This is a podcast where we find ways product designers can face the challenges of getting design done in business every day.

Today we're going to discuss the question:

• Why is design so messy?
• Why are there so many attempts to quantify it?
• And I'll give you my framework and show how it can help you get design done?

I'm Darrell Estabrook, 30 years into UX product design. Yes, that's 55,200 hours, but not nearly as many cups of coffee.

I'm also the founder of designing a platform for product designers who want to design with a why.

Through content coaching and consulting, I grow product designers into design leaders who transform their product, teams, and companies from the inside out.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

So welcome.

What do you know, episode four?

So I really thank you for listening.

I really appreciate it.

I hope you get excited about design as much as I do.

There's so much to consider about it.

It's not just a product design thing.

It's every aspect of your life is designed, has design in it and works better when design is applied.

Because every design that exists has a designer behind it.

If you think about it, you can't even set up a birthday party without designing it.

Think of all the things that go into that.

You've got invitations, decorations, the location, who's invited, who's the guest, or the person of honor?

That's going to matter.

How much money do you have to spend on it?

Are there gifts?

Are there activities?

It just goes on and on.

And technically, if you give a person a cupcake on their birthday, that's really has an element of design to it.

You can't you can't not design and have a birthday party of any kind.

But that's the thing.

Everyone on the planet is involved in designing something in their everyday life.

And it's not a problem.

Or it's not done well, but somehow when we try to do it on purpose, like in a business setting, and for software, it gets all complicated.

Right?

You feel it, right?

It's like you know what needs to be done at least somewhat, but the stakeholders, leaders, colleagues, all these non-designers, they seem baffled at design. Like what you're doing, what it is, and they might not even see the value of it.

And I think it's like this general sentiment.

Designers don't see design as messy.

Right?

It's just, you just, like a fish in water.

You don't know there's water. You just, it's what it is. Piece of cake.

But non-designers, see design, it's messy.

And it's like, whoa, what is going on?

They're on the shore looking in.

How do you do that thing?

So that's the question.

Why is design so messy?

And I think the funny thing is, in this very podcast, I probably swap the order of this topic with the next section several times, I was in my notes, I was like, should I talk about how messy design is, or that there are so many attempts to quantify the design process?

I was like, ah, back and forth is kind of went back and forth because they're both true.

And you can really start with either one and get to where I'm going, but I'll start with Messi, but I probably will kind of mix them up at some point.

So why is it messy?

I get maybe that's not the accurate description.

I kind of like fluid.

Maybe that's a better way to describe it.

Designers are very comfortable working in a fluid process.

Now, some more than others, right, I think that, but at the heart of it, if you're even if you're not aware of what you're doing, you really kind of move between these phases without thinking about it just by doing design.

And designing a user experience, it turns out is not a math problem.

Right.

We did, you just don't put one +4 and get 5 and launch the product.

We're aiming for all of that.

We'd love it to be just so simple to formulaic to do it, and we kind of have some of that in our modular design systems and things like that.

And we call that consistency and setting user expectations and all those things are good.

But the way to do it.

It's not really a formula.

Per se.

There's definitely a process.

But going through the process is what actually informs the process.

So engineers might call that recursive.

It kind of loops in and out of itself.

The answer is part of the next level.

But I still like fluid better.

Because it's even less structured.

I think recursive is too structured, because you could follow it in a logic diagram, but this is fluid.

This is because, right, what you said.

Because, because somewhere down this process, you discover something new and then you need a pivot and tweak what you just designed.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

I mean, there's 0 wrong with that.

That discovery that you may just becomes another insight into what you're doing.

And it could very well be that your design decision 5 minutes ago might have been super solid, but now with this new information, you have to make a new design decision or several.

And this drives stakeholders and engineers crazy because stakeholders are about accomplishment, right?

Time, value, lowering risk.

And your crazy fluid design process is loaded with risk.

It generates these questions.

Will it work better or worse?

Will it cost more or less?

Will it be done on time or not?

Engineers, will it scale or won't it?

All these things.

And you just like, make a design decision.

That's, well, that's fine.

But you can see why there's hesitation to bring in design.

Like, why don't we have a seat at the table?

Well, it's messy.

So what's the antidote?

Well, let's explain it.

Let's chart it and quantify it and and put it in a graphic.

There are so many ways to quantify design.

I, you could throw a nickel and hit a design process on Google.

I found a bunch of them.

Uh, here's one uh, 6 stages of UX design process.

You've got product definition, product research, user analysis, information architecture, design, and then testing and validation.

Poof.

They just do that.

I mean, that's not wrong.

Those are true.

Right?

We've got this other one.

Problem definition, roadmap to get started.

Research, analyze, design, validation, handover.

You got an actual hander.

This one I'm looking at has an actual circle.

I don't actually know where it begins.

It's ever ever looping loop.

But that's fine.

I think, I'm going to start here.

I guess empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

And, I mean, again, these are all true things that happen.

I mean, you know the words.

But this other one is UX in agile, which actually is something that I actually love doing and there's an approach that I use that really dovetails it nicely.

But looking at this graphic, that I'm looking at, it's, it's got circles, smaller circles inside of larger circles, we've got hypothesis, build feedback, market fit, new ideas, pivot, target customers, growth channels.

Yeah, I guess pain point, MVP solution, grow and scale.

So there's just so much out there.

And it's a real need to try to explain design to non-designers.

But how do you do it?

It looks pretty straightforward, right?

Just do the formula every time. Accept it either doesn't work or they really don't know what you're talking about.

Non-designers.

They're looking at this and it's like, that's a good graphic.

I like the layout of it, maybe.

But these don't actually help non-designers see the value of design.

They want delivery on outcomes.

That is the reason, and that, and you do too, as a designer.

You actually want that as we talked in episode 3 last time in designing for value.

So this charting is trying to explain it.

I think to everyone, not just non-designers, because designers want a process to follow consistency consistently.

And even if you are on the newer side of the product design career, it's great to have this.

You know, some kind of follow the steps thing, and it seems so simple, right?

You've got like just follow these steps and you'll do it.

And then you start to realize quickly, oh, except in this case that I'm working on this week, or we don't have those resources to do research and other things.

Or, oh, we don't have the time to do all the nested loops in the process.

And so these don't actually help designers in their day-to-day processes either, really.

Designers want to know how to navigate this ever changing landscape in a consistent way.

Because it's almost like every day, every week. Something's different.

So how do I go forward?

And that's the daily sprint, right?

You're only in today.

As much as you want to have tomorrow in the future, you can only make decisions today.

So I was doom scrolling through LinkedIn.

Not really.

But just noticed all sorts of posts on the design process, on no need for a design process, because we have AI.

And all that.

Some of these things, the concepts of like the double diamond is dead.

If you know what that is, then, yes, you can you can hear that.

Use AI for user research and then don't use AI for user research.

And some of the, there's just so many of those.

I'm a junior designer who never opened a figma and I vibe coded this financial app in Claude code.

It's the future.

And hey, it's great.

I've, um, vibe coded some little widgets as experimental type things.

It's kind of neat, but not this day-to-day stuff.

There's so much more involved.

And of course, my favorite, and this keeps circulating.

UX is dead.

That's is just click bait all over.

So let's throw all that out, get the noise out.

Because it's so easy to get caught up in the hype in the scrolling.

It's almost like just go there, take a look, but don't don't swallow it all.

I've been more of a person to say for any one of these, like, okay, great. Somebody had an idea.

They posted it.

It's, for whatever reason.

My question is always, sure, but does it work in this specific situation, right?

It's kind of like, I want to test these processes to see if it works for where I am at, right?

My current skill, my current situation, like the organization, constraints, things like that.

But the biggest thing I want to know is, will it work every time?

Given all those different situations?

So I like to introduce the designy framework.

This is my answer to all these design frameworks out there and and it's a, it's another approach.

I believe this is scalable.

So you can go very, from the smallest thing you want to design to the largest thing. Scalable conceptually.

It's linear.

So you can go from beginning to end.

It's also nonlinear to a degree.

You can jump around throughout it, and it applies to like app strategy at that highest level, feature design, and even the smallest element on the screen.

I think if you're doing like an infographic or a chart, you can use this framework.

And and it help, it'll guide you.

So the overview.

And again, this is a mind shift.

It's the, it's a, it's not a step by step, but it's a way of thinking.

So 5 steps.

The overview will go through them in a little bit more detail, but define purpose, discover context, create options, make choices, and measure results.

And you might be thinking, okay, yeah, so we've heard this before, and there's similarities to some of these things, but there's a bit of a twist into the detail.

So let's go in.

Let's look at this.

Define purpose.

If what you're designing doesn't have a purpose, then you're going to go about a solution by accident.

It's just the way it is.

Like, this purpose.

It's more than just a goal.

It's more than just an ideal.

It's really an intended outcome.

I like to think of it.

It doesn't even have to be a metric.

It could be specific like that.

It can be broad, but it has to be some kind of outcome.

If we build this thing, we expect this other thing to happen.

Cause effect.

And the question is, do you have that clear?

For whatever you're doing, app to strategy to the smallest element, right?

Is it clear to you?

If it's not, get it nailed down.

Because every design decision you make must point back to that purpose.

Otherwise, you'll spin, the team will spin, stakeholders will spin and around, around.

The next one.

Discover context.

So they can be this way.

If you wear a t-shirt and jeans, that's great for casual outings, right?

But now if you take that and you're going to a wedding, your closed choice just became a poor choice.

And unless that's the dress code for the wedding, and then you're good.

But context matters, right?

Your design decision, uh, in that case makes a huge difference.

And it matters in every design decision you're going to make in your app.

So getting context, discovering that, it can be everything from just a conversation with a person all the way to full-blown research, like a project for research.

So that's the pro tip.

But the pro pro tip is most budgets don't exist for full full-blown research projects.

So having conversations, getting contacts, going, getting scrappy, and trying to understand what you're working on is going to make a big difference.

It's something that needs to happen in order for those design decisions to make sense.

Because yellow is just yellow.

But it matters what you're doing.

The next one, create options.

So I used to deliver one design to clients.

I went through a phase that, here it is.

It turns out that's an ultimatum.

Right?

You just, Here, take it.

That's fine if there's an extremely minimal uncertainty about a thing.

So low risk.

Um, you may not have to reinvent a pie chart, that sort of thing.

But if it's a larger or there's more uncertainty.

Yeah, that's an ultimatum.

It's a lot of risk there.

Then there's the AB designs, right?

2 or so.

That ends up being a choice, right?

A, or B, not nothing else.

That also works well when the scope is small.

But not when there's uncertainty.

We need more than that.

What you're really going for are multiple options.

Three, four, it doesn't matter.

But the mindset should be, that should be your default approach is, hmm, what if, and follow that.

And what if this follow that?

What if this follow that?

They keep following the what ifs.

Because it's the heart of exploration.

And as you're doing it, it helps you to determine trade-offs even to be able to collect them.

So the pro tip, simply having variations is not effective.

So here's the entire, here's the design in the entire color wheel. You know, just pick one.

No, no.

Having these different approaches is where that value lays.

And the pro pro tip is, if you can, you could do this as one person, I usually end up finding, I'm asking that question all the time, like, well, what if this?

Oh, let me do it.

What if that, well, let me do it.

And sometimes the what ifs have what ifs.

But you could have different designers contribute to the same, you know, the purpose and the same design challenge, and you have instant variations, because they're all going to look at it from a different perspective and bring that into it.

They're understanding.

There's value in that.

The 4th one make choices.

So now that we have all these options.

So pick one.

Um, that's we're not picking paint colors for the room.

Choose one.

Just choose one.

We're considering the trade-offs.

That's key.

Right?

And options really helps to do that.

We want things that are uniquely different from each other in order to understand what's what's prominent, what's going to happen.

This is a fundamental skill.

Most designers need to strengthen and it's in giving feedback.

We might call it critique.

Critique might have a bad name.

It doesn't.

It actually is an excellent term.

And it's the way in which you do it. Really matters.

And most teams that are successful on this know how to give actionable feedback.

But the reality is most don't, and most stakeholders don't, and you end up getting vague, unactionable feedback.

And you spin.

I actually have a free course on this one topic alone.

It's it's so big and there's more to be done on it.

You can actually go to academy.designing.com and you'll see it there.

You can sign up and take it.

I'd love for you to take it.

I'll mention this again at the end of the podcast.

And the last one we'll talk about in the designy framework is measure results.

So this is like context in that sense.

But you have no idea whether your design has fulfilled its purpose without getting some kind of feedback.

And again, this is can be anything from a user interview to full-on user analytics, from a production site, that whole gamut.

But the pro tip is you'll need to get some kind of response to your designs.

Otherwise it's just guesswork.

In some cases, it's informed guesswork.

You've got a lot of informed decisions going into it.

Not everything needs a research, but the Pro Pro tip is the amount of measurement depends on the uncertainty of the solution, because you, if you don't know, if it's larger, like there's, there's different cases where you need to go deep, and that's with all of these, the depth in which you go depends on what you're doing.

So you have to start with purpose.

Otherwise, there's really no point in anything else in these.

But even so, you'll find in some of these cases, especially as you're going through context and options, you're making choices, you may discover along the way that the purpose has been clarified or expanded, and that in and of itself is excellent to do.

So jumping through that, uh, updating the purpose you're doing, the intended outcome for this design, uh, that'll have an effect on everything else down the down the lane.

So you can jump between these steps as needed.

But it's less of a step framework and more of a mindset.

And I think if you practice this mindset, it'll align your design decisions and align your team, as you live this design process.

So what do you take away from this?

Design is messy.

It just is.

That's the reality, but don't shy away from it.

Lean into it.

These design frameworks, they're good, they're worth looking at.

Just know they can be rigid.

But the designy framework is a way to shift your thinking when you approach any design challenge.

And all of that is because stakeholders want a high value and low risk.

Deliver strong designs, and you will demonstrate that.

And the designing framework can help.

So I mentioned before, check out the free course, “Getting Design Feedback That's Actionable.”

You can get it at my training section of Designy Academy.

So just go to academy.designey.com and check out that free course, sign up, leave a comment, have a discussion.

I'll join in.

It'll be great.

So other ways you can get involved with The Daily Sprint.

You could follow and subscribe right on whatever platform you're listening to right now.

If you have any questions, you did the exercise, you did the lists, you, I said something maybe here that you like have a question about, go to designy.com/ask.

And while you're there, sign up for the free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

So thanks for listening to The Daily Sprint today.

Remember, today is a great day to design with a why.

See you next time.