This monomyth shows up the world over, in all cultures and from all eras. This structure has evolved to be incredibly effective at capturing our attention. In other words, this structure is sticky.

We prioritize design’s impact on the community

User control and freedom is the principle that people will take many paths through an interface (not always the intended ones), and so wherever they end up, they should be able to return to where they came from or change their mind. The notions of “Cancel” and “Undo” are the best examples of user control and freedom: they allow users to change their mind if they ended up in a state they didn’t want to be in. The dialog below is a major violation of this principle; it gives all of the power to the computer:

. Which tasks you choose depends on which tasks you think will be most important and common when people are using your solution. Good tasks define the goal you want a user to achieve with your design without giving away any of the knowledge they need to achieve the goal. If you do give away this knowledge, then it wouldn’t be a fair test of your design in the real world, because you wouldn’t have been there to help.

Designers therefore have a responsibility to think carefully about who their serving through a choice of defaults, engaging with communities to understand how they’ll be impacted.

Of course, after all of this discussion of making, it’s important to reiterate: the purpose of a prototype isn’t the making of it, but the knowledge gained from making and testing it. This means that what you make has to be closely tied to how you test it. What aspect of the prototype is most critical to the test, and therefore must be high fidelity?What details can low-fidelity, because they have less bearing on what you’re trying to learn?Who will you test it with, and are they in a position to give you meaningful feedback about the prototype’s ability to serve your stakeholders’ needs?As we will discuss in the coming chapters, these questions have their own complexity.

The order questions are asked is of particular importance when tracking trends over time. As a result, care should be taken to ensure that the context is similar each time a question is asked. Modifying the context of the question could call into question any observed changes over time (see measuring change over time for more information).

Create a short list of main comparison criteria before you start. You can always add more criteria if it makes sense. This will keep your research guided.Remember to add the product you’re designing to the analysis to see how your product compares to the competition.Know when to stop. Start with 3–5 main competitors. Once you uncover the information you need in order to inform your design decisions, it’s time to stop.Don’t simply copy the designs you find in your research. The competitors may not be using best practices. Instead, be inspired by the solutions found in your research and adapt the solutions to fit your brand, product, and users.Be tool agnostic. Choose the tool that helps you present your findings based on the information you are documenting and sharing.Know when to perform a “comparative analysis.” Study solutions from products that are not direct competitors.

Even in a community, everyone is different: coming to agreement on who is being served, why they are being served, and what one believes is causing the problem, and how it impacts a particular group, is key to focusing design efforts.

. 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.

Another form of critique that can be applied to design is Socratic questioning. In this form of critique, the person giving the critique wants to deeply probe the designer’s way of thinking and dig beneath the surface of their design. Some types of questions to achieve this include:Clarification  questions, which encourage the designer to clarify their thought process.Questions that challenge the designer’s  assumptions .Questions that encourage the designer to consider  alternative perspectives .Questions that encourage the designer to spell out the  implications and consequences  of their design.Now imagine a dozen other students observing this dialog. What would they get from it? They’d see, like you’re seeing on this web page, an example of how to share feedback, how to receive it, and deep domain knowledge about the nature of email as social media. This means that you have much to gain just by watching critique happen, in addition to participating in it yourself.

However, most societies do not value creative thinking and so our skills in generating ideas rapidly atrophies, as we do not practice it, and instead actively learn to suppress it1

Wisdom from many creators have found many strategies that might be called process that can organize and channel your naturally creative mind.

One critique of human-centered design is that it narrowly focuses on people and their needs rather than a systems-level view of the activities that people engage in, and the multiple people and systems involved in those activities.

After some time, I also realized that if design was problem solving, then we all design to some degree. When you rearrange your room to better access your clothes, you’re doing interior design. When you create a sign to remind your roommates about their chores, you’re doing information design. When you make a poster or a sign for a club, you’re doing graphic design. We may not do any of these things particularly well or with great expertise, but each of these is a design enterprise that has the capacity for expertise and skill.