Common sense is not so common

I’ve been designing mobile apps and websites for 17 years, for everyone from garage startups to large corporations like T-Mobile and Vodafone.

My biggest strength is working across teams and functions. Good design can’t be done in a vacuum; it needs to respect business needs, development constraints and sometimes regulatory constraints. You need the full picture.

To me, design is problem solving. The drawing, wireframing and pixel-pushing are just one part.

My design strength is UX and interaction design: untangling complex problems into meaningful, simple flows. I see “user experience” broadly: the product in the context of the whole user journey, the context of other products and touchpoints, and technical details like speed, loading times, offline behaviour and error recovery.

I’m a big fan of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design Guidelines, and a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. These guidelines answer a huge number of app design questions, yet they’re surprisingly often not known or ignored.

And I prototype heavily: from quick Figma flows to fully functional prototypes in SwiftUI (or whatever is right for the web) that run directly on device, pull real data, and use real features like camera, microphone, gyroscope, whatever is needed. Real prototypes mean real testing, and far fewer expensive surprises later.

Here are a few more thoughts on how I think:

In my experience, most are trying to do too much – true of tiny startups and huge corporations alike. Startups run out of money before they ship; corporations burn it building things nobody wants.

Keeping it simple minimises the risk: simple things are easier to finish, maintain, expand and fix. But simple isn’t enough on its own – you have to think critically and take the time to understand the problem. There’s no way to solve a problem well without thoroughly understanding what you’re building, for whom, and why.

There are numerous approaches and processes that can be helpful because they’re battle-tested and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel all the time. Famous one is Design Thinking: a set of iterative steps that greatly improve your chances of arriving at a good solution. You can look at a simple schema of Design Thinking or read a massive body of work on the topic; whichever way you choose, I highly recommend having some sort of backbone process in place and using it at least as guidance.

But my point is this: if you don’t apply critical thinking at every step of the process, you will fail. Even the greatest process won’t save you from yourself. By critical thinking I mean really understanding what you are doing: listen, observe, learn, think carefully, think twice, don’t give in to biases, question everything, question the data you have, question what is data and what is just an assumption, don’t jump to conclusions, question your own conclusions, play the devil’s advocate and try to shred your own conclusions to pieces. Take the time to have that internal intellectual discussion and fight with and against yourself. Sleep on it. Rethink it the next day, week or month and see if it still holds.

It’s really easy to screw up in the initial “empathize” phase – understanding the user needs and doing the user research. The human brain is inherently prone to jumping to conclusions. It’s designed to jump to conclusions, from the neurological perspective, in fact. And this applies to brains of users you study, as well as to the brains of those conducting the study. Just look at the list of these “cognitive biases” and then have a look at any user research – I guarantee you will see many of them all over the place.

Luckily, the human brain, unlike that of most other mammals, is also able to recognize cognitive biases, realize they are in play and adjust accordingly. But that’s resource-hungry. So while almost every human is capable of it, it requires continuous effort and discipline to do it consistently. People say “thinking hurts”. It’s more complex than that, of course: so complex that people have won Nobel prizes for studying related topics or had profound impact (Kahneman & Tversky, Thaler, Chomsky, …), and so fascinating that popular books have been written about it (Gladwell, Taleb, Kahneman, Schwartz, …).

These are the areas where I personally produce the most tangible outputs; they are usually my core tasks on projects.

In the beginning I wrote “less is more” and “the devil is in the details”. Those quotes are ascribed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the most influential architects in history. He, together with others, brought about a new era in architecture and a different approach where “form follows function” (Louis Sullivan) and “ornament is a crime” (Adolf Loos). While “less is more” is a good guiding principle, it must go hand in hand with “the devil is in the details”. In other words, a design is simple as a result of thoroughly thinking through every single detail; nothing feels random, everything feels considered and intentional.

These principles echoed in all other creative professions during the 20th century, including product design and later digital product design. One popular manifesto among product designers, expanding on the above thoughts, is Dieter Rams’ 10 principles of good design. Admiring Dieter Rams is a bit of a cliché among designers, but reading his 10 principles and giving them deeper thought is an important mental exercise that every designer should practice repeatedly.

This sounds like a step for developers, and is often detached from the design process. However, close cooperation between designers and developers is absolutely crucial. Designers nowadays learn how important it is to understand how digital products are made, what are the technical possibilities and restrictions and benefit from introducing principles that are commonplace in software development for decades, and only now are finding way into design work. The design systems movement is an example of this trend, resulting from growing capabilities of modern digital products and, at the same time, the effort to keep things simple and manageable.

If you like my approach, I’d be glad to help you – email me.