When do we move on?
As a designer, I’m often asking myself questions like, “Is this good enough for now? Can we start putting this in front of users to gather feedback? This whole solution is based on a single assumption... is that okay for now?” It can often be hard to answer questions like this when you’ve spent so much time with your head down in the weeds designing a solution. My design director and I took to a whiteboard one day in an attempt to create a simple framework our team could use to make go/no-go decisions throughout the design process.
We came up with this diagram. Here’s the gist. Generally, when our confidence in a solution or an assumption is higher than the risk of us getting it wrong, we move forward. However, if the risk outweighs our confidence, we determine what we need to learn in order to raise our confidence to a tolerable level, and we put together a research plan. I’ll admit this isn’t incredibly precise and ‘Low’ and ‘High’ on either axis are subjective, but we’ve found it incredibly useful for facilitating meaningful conversations with our cross-functional team.
