Decision-making toolkit for UX and product designers

How to form strong opinions and confidently propose the ‘right’ design solutions

Published in

UX Collective

10 min readFeb 20, 2022

As designers, we often tend to put people first. We find a sense of meaning and purpose in building products that meet their needs and wants. And there’s no greater joy than seeing the same people appreciate your work and product. As we empathise with the people using our products and services, we sometimes overlook the business side of things.

Businesses exist primarily to make money. Sure, they hired you as a designer to build great products and solve user problems, but they also hired you to make money for them. Businesses depend on money to grow, sustain, and eventually create more and better products.

You may come up with an excellent solution to address your users’ needs and wants, but it may not be the best solution from a business point of view. Here’s an analogy — Think about concept cars. They’re probably the most well-designed and engineered automobiles on paper, usually built to push technology and bring attention to the brand. However, they rarely go into production for a number of reasons, from market not being ready to high manufacturing costs. And when they do go into production, you’ll see that they are almost always slightly different from the original concept. The bottom line is — concept cars in their original forms are rarely viable from a business standpoint.

In the same way, a great designer plays a balanced act to create design solutions that work both for the people using the product as well as for the business — They may not be the fanciest solutions, but they are the ‘right’ solutions!

The 3E’s that make up the ‘right’ solution

Efficiency

Refers to the cost of the solution. It is about the time, effort, and money that goes into creating it.

Elegance

Refers to the quality of the solution. It is about how well the solution is crafted in terms of performance, appeal, usability, delight, etc.

Effectiveness

Refers to the merit of the solution. It is about how well the solution solves the problem /achieves the goals. It is usually measured with metrics like NPS, engagement, task completion rate, etc.

As designers and fellow product owners, we should all aim towards maximising all the 3Es — efficiency, elegance, and effectiveness!

So, how do you get to the ‘right’ solution?

The Decision-Making Toolkit

An illustration of 4 bulbs of different shapes emitting light. — 4 solutions that emit light. Which one is the ‘right’ solution?

As UXers and product designers, more often than not, we end up creating multiple solutions for a given problem. It’s part of our messy, non-linear design process. A great designer not only comes up with creative solutions addressing both user needs and business goals but also forms strong opinions and confidently proposes the right design solution. Developing strong decision-making skills is also vital for designers to grow in their careers.

To propose the right design solution, you need the right tools to support the ones that work and discard the ones that don’t. Here are a few tools you can rely on to form strong opinions and make confident design decisions:

1. Focus more on the cons than the pros

We all love our designs. Listing down the advantages of the solution we created feels good and is fun! But it’s equally or maybe even more disappointing if they don’t work in the real world.

Stress-test and critique your designs to list as many cons as you can. It is probably the best way to narrow down your solutions. In other words, focus more on the question of ‘why should we NOT go with this solution?’ rather than ‘why should we go with the solution?’.

Here are some prompts to stress-test solutions on the go:

Will it work on smaller screens? Will it work on touch screens?
Is it locale-friendly? Is it translation-friendly?
Does it work with slower internet speeds?
Is this solution accessible?
Does it work with important edge cases?

Evaluate how well different solutions fare against such questions and bid farewell to the ones that don’t fare well. Find the deal-breakers and pick the solution that’s more robust!

2. Define the ideal characteristics of the solution

Once the product goals are defined by the team, the next step is to identify and define the characteristics that are important to have in the final solution. These will act as guardrails as you explore different solutions.

For example, if the team decides ‘speed’ is the most important characteristic, developers will focus on code quality and performance, marketing folks will work on promoting it as a unique proposition, and so on. And as designers, we should ensure that every micro-UX decision we make aligns with the core characteristic(s). To build speed into the solution, constantly question the need for adding more steps/actions as you design the flows, and trim down anything that is not adding value or slowing down the user. Think along the lines of bare minimums and reversibility. Here are a few other prompts:

Is saving time for the users the most important characteristic?
Is making the flow fool-proof most important?
Are we building primarily for clarity and trust?
Is it crucial that users follow our recommendations?

Identifying these characteristics upfront helps you stay away from solutions that don’t satisfy them. If you still end up with multiple solutions, lean towards the one that satisfies the most important characteristic.

3. Rely on fundamental experience values

Experience values are defined at a company or a parent product level. They are by no means rules that you have to follow but are guidelines that enable a common language within the company to create cohesive experiences. They are even more relevant and useful if a company has multiple design teams working on different sub-product lines. If your team or company doesn’t have them defined, evaluate the need and work towards defining them based on your product, business, and users.

At Shopify, one of the experience values is, ‘Make it easier to succeed and harder to fail.’ For example, when user actions are reversible or straightforward, we keep them as effortless as possible. And in cases where they are irreversible or risky, we add positive friction to make sure the users clearly understand the associated outcomes before taking the actions.

You can make your design process easier by combining experience values with the solution characteristics. A hot-tip is to identify upfront any such experience values ‘relevant’ to the problem and use them in the solution-ing phase.

4. Lean towards established patterns (or maybe not?)

This seems like a no-brainer, right? Not really… Established patterns are very relatable and often have little to no learning curve for the users. So, more often than not, using established patterns works just fine. But the thought of using an established pattern for a problem usually comes from the designer’s intuition — and intuition, if used alone might not necessarily result in the most ‘effective’ solutions. Think ‘Tinder swipe.’ It was a design decision to not follow an existing pattern but instead, introduce something more delightful and arguably more effective for the given use case.

Use new patterns, concepts, and nomenclature only when they are well thought out, introduced, tested, and arguably better. In all other cases, rely on established patterns as much as possible.

5. Estimate the effort required to build each solution

As designers, a part of us always wants to create shiny, meaty designs. Who wouldn’t want to have these in their portfolio? There’s nothing right or wrong about it. But, as designers and fellow product owners, we build products for our users to solve their problems. Nothing can come before them and their needs. So, when you have two or more equally good solutions, pick the one that is estimated to have a greater return on investment or requires low effort.

There’s no greater win than shipping solutions and solving problems with speed. This point also illustrates the importance of strong collaboration between designers and developers.

6. Estimate the cost of rolling back each solution

Oftentimes you end up in situations where you don’t have the time to do user testing or have the infrastructure to run A/B tests. This situation only gets tricky if you need to ship a solution very quickly. In such cases, in addition to looking at the effort to build each solution, evaluate the cost of rolling back each one of them and pick the one that has the least amount of risk. Here are some prompts:

Is this solution reversible?
Would we lose trust if we roll it back?
Would we add a lot of support debt if we roll it back?
Would we be introducing a new, hard-to-reverse user behaviour?

This point also illustrates the importance of strong collaboration between designers, product managers, and customer support.

7. Don’t forget the 80/20 rule*

Sometimes, a solution might not work equally well for 100% of use-cases/users. This can be very hard to achieve. In such cases, spending time, effort, and money towards finding the perfect solution might not be very wise. This is where the classic 80–20 rule comes in handy. Discard the solutions that don’t work for at least 80% of the use-cases/users. Select those that score high on working for the most important use-cases/set of users while ensuring clear documentation on trade-offs. This will help you ship faster.

But, *if solving for 100% use-cases/users really well is crucial, consider breaking down the problem further and/or taking a tailored approach that could involve different solutions for different use-cases/users.

8. Evaluate solutions against long-term vision and short-term goals

Developers can relate very well to this — especially when they’re thinking about problems like infrastructure, scalability, etc. When building and optimising for the short-term (in the interest of shipping value to users quickly), we sometimes overlook the amount of backlog that it could generate for the future.

If the problem space you’re in is continuously changing or growing, it’s a good idea to have a long-term plan. In such instances, you can focus on creating solutions to solve the immediate problem, but also investigate how the same solutions can evolve to address future needs. Use the findings to evaluate the merits of different solutions. If the problem space is rather stable, building for short-term or local-maxima is usually fine.

You may also want to consider and evaluate how your solutions might affect or influence other product-work streams in the company. If they do, consult and collaborate with the relevant teams.

9. Make use of data and research at every step of the design process

No one can argue against well-vetted data — be it internal data or well-sourced external data. Best designers use data to validate the pain points, understand their size/severity, and identify opportunities to create data-informed solutions. For example, ‘pre-selecting smart defaults’ speeds up flows on most occasions. Instead of making plain-old-intuition-based guesses, use data to identify the popular selections and use them. Exceptions include cases where you want to induce new behaviour(s) or cases where the risk associated with making a wrong selection is high.

Similarly, use research and user testing to get closer to your users. For example, simply understanding how tech-savvy your users are, helps you make tons of UX decisions around your product design and content — say around language, tone, font treatment, etc.

In a nutshell, use data, research, and user feedback to invalidate solutions that might not work and validate solutions that can work.

10. Test the fluidity of the designs

Sometimes, when we’re working in low-fidelity, we tend to overlook the higher layers like interactions, transitions, animations, and continuity. Only when you prototype in high-fidelity with full picture, you’ll start discovering gaps like the number of actions, potential distractions, and drop-off points. This is another way to test the merits of different solutions.

Conclusion

An illustration of a bulb emitting light. — The ‘right’ solution

Think beyond UX

It is important to realise that evaluating a solution purely from a UX lens is not enough. No user will judge a product based on individual disciplinary work (UX, tech, etc). It doesn’t matter to them. All that matters is if we’re solving for their needs and wants the right way.

As UXers and product designers, our role is to not just come up with some design solutions. We’re equal owners of the product just like any other discipline owner. It’s our responsibility to solve the right problems, the right way by making sure they work well in the real world and have a positive return on investment for the business. Broadening our vision and exposure helps us see the big picture, and this context helps us in making the right decisions at every touchpoint — yes, even with those tiny UX decisions — that make the larger product that it is!

In addition to taking feedback from fellow designers and leads, take help from developers, product managers, data scientists, customer support, sales team or anyone you think can add value to your decision process and unblock you. Trust me, they always have something more to add!

Avoid bikeshedding

Don’t spend too much time on trivial decisions that may have little to no impact on the final solution. Time-box them as needed. Use the time saved on decisions that make or break the solutions. Here’s a great article by Brandon Chu on allocating time for taking decisions of varying importance. Avoid delaying decisions at the cost of time, money, and patience of the users!

Measure effectiveness and elegance

Document all the key decisions and associated tradeoffs made during the design process. Once the solution is shipped, use them as benchmarks to measure its effectiveness and elegance. Finally, analyse the metrics to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Retrospect on efficiency

Conduct team and/or discipline retros to understand what went well, what can be better, and what went wrong from a process standpoint. Identify opportunities for improving the efficiency of decision-making processes.

The tools mentioned in this article are by no means exhaustive. Use them as you see fit in your projects. And if you have anything to add, feel free to add them as comments so we all can benefit from them.

If you want to chat further about this topic or just about anything related to UX and design, feel free to connect with me on Twitter.

P.S: I want to thank Matt Hryhorsky for always pushing me towards building this thinking that helped me become the designer that I am today. Special thanks to Rohit Mishra for always being a great sounding board for feedback.

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