How do we make design decisions?

Decision-making, in general, is proven to be mentally draining, not only for a specific domain or a profession but even for simple everyday decisions. The more decisions we make in a day the more stressful it may seem. The decisions we make at work are even more stressful and might influence far more people than ourselves. So it is important to approach these decisions accordingly.

What are the decisions we have to make?

In our day-to-day design lives, we often come across cases that require our expertise and decision-making. Decisions might be high impact or low impact and depending on your position in the organization you might be exposed to ones more often than the others. With impact, decisions tend to have reversibility, which usually influences how nervous we can be while making that decision or how much preparation we need to be able to call the shots.

Should your CTA buttons be a certain color? Should you change the flow of a certain prototype? Maybe invest more in research? Change the tone of voice in the UX copy. — These are all different types of UX decisions that might require different approaches.

Categorizing design decisions

In general, decisions can be tactical, strategic, or operational.

Tactical decisions have low impact and are easier to reverse, strategic decisions are high impact and require more recourses to reverse, and finally, operational decisions are simple and routine decisions that are usually predefined and have a set of rules to act according to. People in every field adapt their decision-making style to the situation. How long we spend making a decision should be determined by how reversible, strategic, and impactful the decision outcome is.

Approaches to decision-making

while making every decision our mind goes through the process, that starts with identifying the options for the problem, reviewing the information stored from past experiences, then implementing the decision and waiting for the outcome to hopefully analyze it for future situations. Some steps can be skipped per situation.

Approaching different situations

Approaching Simple situations — Simple contexts are characterized by a well-understood environment with clear cause-and-effect relationships. Simple contexts are very rarely subject to doubts or arguments. Everyone in the organization shares the same understanding which gives you the ability to follow best practices or prioritize the company’s principles or the design system. These types of decisions are usually easily reversible and don’t require lots of technical resources to change. An example might be the color of a certain button. In this example, the designer can look through past usages of the button of the same category and use the design system to make a quick decision.

Oversimplifying the context can sometimes have a negative side, we often rely on our past training and experiences too much and don’t leave room for new ways of thinking. It is important to keep best practices, design systems, and principles alive and dynamic, and in sync with the brand to always be relevant for usage across the company.

How do design principles guide our decisions?

Design principles are value statements that describe the specific goals or priorities for the brand and the product, they should reflect the business strategy so that values are clear to everyone. With well-curated design principles, tradeoffs become easier to manage, we understand what to prioritize, and therefore can make simple decisions without much effort.

Approaching Chaotic situations — Emergencies unique to a particular design with no established solution. Relationships between cause and effect shift constantly and no manageable patterns exist. Decisions made during these situations are based on intuition, which is a sense of past intellectual experiences. In chaotic situations, leadership usually acts before analyzing, and the only thing we can do before is to go through the outcomes by mentally simulating them. After chaotic situations, it is advised to keep track of the decisions and outcomes from user research, analytics, customer satisfaction surveys, or A/B experimentation.

Approaching Complicated situations — Complicated contexts involve many different variables within a well-understood context. They contain multiple right answers, and it is hard to see a clear relationship between cause and effect. These situations require time to be spent. We need to identify options, gather info from past experiences, research and analytics results, and evaluate each visualized option against chosen criteria.

Approaching Complex situations — These situations are unique to a particular design in an unfamiliar context, without established solution patterns. They are “unknown unknowns” and require research to uncover these unknowns. It might be helpful to deconstruct large, complex problems into smaller parts and use hypothesis-based research to gather necessary data.

Complicated and complex situations require research, they are hard to reverse and costly, so it is important to consider many criteria. Visualizing and prototyping can help test solutions early with users and uncover unknowns.

Following up on decisions

Regardless of the situation and context, it is important to learn from your mistakes or successes, it is important to follow up on every decision made, review outcomes, and compare with expectations. It is impossible to know whether you solved a design problem or caused an even worse one without testing the usability of the products we create. We use metrics to continue refining products for users and improve.

Metrics can include Task success rate — to measure the percentage of correctly completed flows, Time spent on task — which can help you identify bottleneck flows, Abandonment rate — which can indicate users’ confusion or frustrations and similar usability metrics that are relevant to your product or service.

It is a common urge to rely only on metrics and save time and resources, but sometimes the things we need aren’t numbers but insights. So to uncover insights, identify problems, and opportunities we use qualitative studies and improve our products by being empathetic to users' feelings and needs.

References:

Technical terms and definitions are learned and understood from NN/g UX conferences.

Illustrations are from https://www.figma.com/community/file/900372729535365633/Denmark-Illustrations