One way to avoid this harm, while still sharing harsh feedback, is to follow a simple rule: if you’re going to say something sharply negative, say something genuinely positive first, and perhaps something genuinely positive after as well. Some people call this the “hamburger” rule, other people call it a “shit sandwich.” Whatever you want to call it, finding something positive to say about something you don’t like forces you to consider the possibility that there is something actually good about the idea, even though all you might notice is what isn’t working.

Externalize often. The more you express those ideas—in words, in sketches, in prototypes, in demos—the more visible those flaws will be to you and other people. There’s a reason that Leonardo da Vinci kept a notebook in which he sketched and wrote every idea he had: it allowed him to see those ideas, share those ideas, critique those ideas, and improve those ideas. Had he kept them all in his head, his limited capacity to see and reason about those ideas would have greatly limited his productivity.

First, I just argued, people are inherently creative, at least within the bounds of their experience, so you can just ask them for ideas. For example, if I asked you, as a student, to imagine improvements or alternatives to lectures, with some time to reflect, you could probably tell me all kinds of alternatives that might be worth exploring.

Once you have defined goals, personas, and scenarios, the final challenge is to try to explain the problem you’re solving to other people. If you can’t do this, you can’t convince them you have a real problem to solve, you can’t convince other people to help you solve it, and you certainly can’t convince a boss or an investor that you should spend time on solving it. Therefore, you’ll want to take all of the knowledge you have and try to write a simple argument that articulates the problem.

By now, you should be recognizing that problems are in no way simple. Because everyone’s problems are personal and have different causes and consequences, there is no such thing as the “average user”77 Trufelman, A. (2016). On average. 99% Invisible. . Every single solution will meet some people’s needs while failing to meet others. And moreover, solutions will meet needs in different degrees, meaning that every solution will require some customization to accommodate the diversity of needs inherent to any problem. The person you’re designing for is not like you and really not like anyone else. The best you can do is come up with a spectrum of needs to design against, and then decide who you’re going to optimize for.

In modern design education (found primarily in schools of design and art) we see another form of design process that some have called “designerly ways of knowing55 Cross, N. (1982). Designerly ways of knowing. Design Studies. . Here, the idea is that trained designers arrive at knowledge through synthesis—forming coherent systems of ideas from disparate parts—whereas other kinds of thinking involve analysis—taking a coherent system and deconstructing it, as scientists do with nature. Synthesis is similar to divergent thinking in that they both focus on new possibilities; analysis and convergent thinking are similar in that they both reduce possibilities.

In a way, all of these skills are fundamentally about empathy55 Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008). Empathy and experience in HCI. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI). , because they all require a designer to see problems and solutions from other people’s perspectives, whether these people are users, other designers, or people in other roles, such as marketers, engineers, project managers, etc.