A couple weeks ago I listed out a bunch of activities designers can use to reduce time to clarity.

Upon completing one of these activities I’ll generally report back to my team to recap everything that I’ve observed. This can be a really valuable step in the design process, for a couple of reasons:

A) By itemizing everything, I’m able to better mentally process what I’ve observed.
B) Other people on my team may end up seeing patterns that I didn’t see.
C) Everyone on my team will have the chance to learn (which is really the main goal of these activities)
D) By reporting back, I can help everyone on my team better understand the thought process behind my designs.

A quick word of caution

One pitfall I commonly find myself falling into is my tendency to mix “proposed solutions” in with my recap of insights & observations.

It’s easy to do.

But doing so can easily derail everything.

Why is that?

By mixing solutions in with observations, I’m essentially mixing biased ideas in with relatively unbiased insights. This just increases the chance for:

• disagreements (the focus of these recaps should be on the observations – on what I learned – ideally this should lead to very few disagreements)
• “rabbit hole” discussions that steal the focus of the thread
• my unbiased insights being ignored, or even dismissed completely

One easy solution

Why not just separate the two out completely?

1) Post my insights and observations, being careful not to mix in any proposed solutions.
2) Then as a threaded reply to that main post, go ahead and list out any solutions that I came up with.

By compartmentalizing the two, I can help keep the primary focus of the discussion on the insights & observations. Teammates are then free to pick and choose which discussions they want to participate in, be that:

• insights and observations
• proposed solutions
• or both

I’d love to hear your thoughts.