Wrestling through design chaos

Do I go with a table view, or a card layout?

Do I make this page of the dashboard as a parent, or a child?

Should a selected row on the table allow for deep filtering, multiple dynamic actions, or simply changing a single status?

Questions like these, and dozens more, have been going through my head the last few days as I’ve been trying to build out a dashboard design.

When you’re in the thick of it with a project, it’s easy to get lost in the debate between continuing further into the details, and stepping back to see the picture as a whole.

Finding the balance requires experience, feedback from others, insights from users, knowledge of how data is being used, and an intuition of where to put your time.

In the middle of a project it’s easy to go on for ever. You keep pushing, keep iterating, keep modifying all the dials and knobs, to get to a point of perfection.

But perfection is an illusion. No such thing exists with in-progress projects, or even shipped features out in the world. There’s only improvements or degredations on reaching the goal that you set out to accomplish.

Right now I’m in the middle of a redesign for a feature. I’m spending time to make sure I get all the little details right, understanding the existing pieces and how they fit together, while working to improve the flow as a whole and ensure new users coming in will benefit from the work we’ve done.

Some days it’s easy to get lost in all those details.

Here are a few methods I’ve found for working through the messiness.

Rubber duck

Talk through the problem you’re facing.

Write it out. Ask ChatGPT to help you untangle the chaos, literally speak your problem to a rubber duck, talk to colleagues and users and see if the thing you’re wrestling with makes sense.

Often when I’m unclear on a solution I’ll step back and define the problem. Just writing it out with an intention to share is often enough to unlock the brain and move forward.

When I can’t decide between a table view or card view, it’s a great time to explain the job the design must do, who it’s helping, and what the definition of done looks like.

Show a wrong solution

It’s an oft quoted theme of the internet. If you want to find the right answer go ahead and put the wrong one out there. Someone is sure to jump in and offer feedback. When I’m feeling stuck I’ll quickly sketch out the idea, design it in Figma, or define a solution in words. I’ll then share that, to see what sort of reaction I get.

The goal is not to create something perfect, in fact I’m very much trying to make something that is not right. By doing that I’m inviting others to look at it, turn their heads, shake their heads, or get a little bothered, and let me what they’d improve.

That’s where sketching and rapid prototyping comes in.

Talking through vague ideas in a meeting is all fine and good to get the process moving. But when someone whiteboards out what they imagine as a solution, they immediately invite others into their thinking.

Instead of nebulous ideas floating in the ether, we’re pulling the intangible to a physical space, and adding definition in a way that can be challenged.

Ship and learn

At some point all the research and learnings offer a point of diminshing returns. Sometimes we just need to put a feature out into the world and see what happens. If you have the technical ability for experiments or split testing, then you can see how the changed design improves on the original. Or if you have no original, you can put two ideas out and see which one converts better.

With design and software there is no done, there’s only useful or less useful.

Switch to another task

When we’ve become miopically focused on a task, and see no way out or through, we can switch to working on something else for a few hours, or a day, or longer.

The new energy required to move to another problem space entirely can help to unlock what our brain was wrestling with on the previous task.

Many times I’ve found solutions after sleeping on it. I dive into something new and suddenly find a way to fix the project that’s temporarily on pause.

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If you’re wrestling through designing, just know you’re not alone. This is a perennial problem that requires less brute force, and more finding ways around the problem space.