Why is great design so elusive? Why do requirements so often shift late in the game, wasting months of effort and millions of dollars? Where should we look to come up with breakthroughs product concepts? How can we make our design process less chaotic?
For years, I have sketched out a simple diagram to explain to clients my answers to these types of questions.
This diagram, the Design Pyramid, suggests that the design we can see and touch is just the tip of the iceberg. It is supported by distinct layers of information and prerequisite decisions. The four layers of the pyramid are Design, Requirements, Vision, and Understanding.
The Design Layer
The design is simply the solution to a functional design problem. For software products, the solution includes the user experience architecture, the interactions, conceptual model, and so on. It even includes the internal software architectures.
The Requirements Layer
Requirements are the bridge between the vision and the specific design. The vision gives general, high-level guidance on what the design must achieve. The requirements play this out into enough detail to give the team concrete criteria for designing and building the product.
If the vision is clear and well-founded, playing out the requirements will be a snap. If the vision is muddy, then requirements are challenging because whoever is creating them must do both jobs at the same time. But defining requirements and establishing the vision are really separate disciplines. Doing them both at the same time is like trying to paint a room while deciding on a paint color.
The Vision Layer
The vision establishes which problems the design should solve. When you craft the vision, you select which set of customer needs to address out of the universe of possibilities.
If product creation is like an ship’s journey across a sea, the vision is the destination port. It establishes where everyone should be paddling. If the destination is not precisely defined, radical course corrections will be needed, wasting a lot of paddling. In the worst case, the ship runs out of supplies. With a badly chosen destination, the journey fails even before it begins.
And so it goes with products. When requirements shift radically during development, or when the product gets canceled just before or after launch, it’s often because of fatal flaws in the vision that are discovered too late. These flaws often trace down to missing or erroneous assumptions, which reside in the Understanding layer below.
The Understanding Layer
To chart a course to a worthwhile destination, it helps to have a complete, accurate map. This is where the Understanding layer comes in.
The Understanding layer is made up of any insight that help us come up with a good solution. These can come from just about anywhere, but there is a core set that is needed across all functional design problems:
- Understanding of stakeholders: who the customers and users are and how they segment themselves, so we are clear on who needs what.
- Understanding their specific situations and needs: so we understand not only what matters to them, but why it matters. This deeper empathy allows us to interpolate and extrapolate from what they tell us, which in turn lets us create things that the customers themselves will want, but cannot anticipate (Hint: this is a key source of innovation!)
- Understanding of the competition: so we understand what unmet needs remain to be solved. We need to have a sense where they are going
- Understanding of the status quo:if we are improving on an existing product, we need to lay bare its limitations, devoid of spin.
- Understanding of technology: so we can make the connections between what is needed and what is possible.
Now that we’ve touched on all four layers, let’s use the Design Pyramid to answer some questions at the top of this essay.
Why is great product design so elusive?
Each layer of the Design Pyramid can only be as good as those below it. If a design’s requirements are faulty, design will not match what customers need. If the vision is flawed, the product will be solving a problem that is unimportant to customers, and the design will be irrelevant. And if the base assumptions about customers are incorrect, the vision will be misguided.
Therefore, great product design is elusive mainly because of omissions at the lower two levels of the Pyramid.
The vision layer gets especially short shrift. Despite its potential to make or break the product, organizations rarely allot time to do it properly. Even when there is time, teams don’t always know how to go about it. I don’t blame them: the concepts and methods of product vision are not yet well established.
I consider product vision to be the missing discipline in product creation, and a ripe area to be matured over the next ten years. (I’ll have heaps more to say about this in the coming months!)
Where does the Design Pyramid apply?
The power of the Design Pyramid is that its lessons apply to all types of functional design — meaning, whenever the product exists to address customer needs.
I’m using the term “product” in this article, but the Pyramid also applies to interaction design, information architecture, services, database design, building architecture, new process workflow, retail store layout, public policy, legislation and much more.
These type of problems have the same dynamic. We need masterful understanding of customers, competitors and technology to sculpt a vision of a problem with solving. The the high-level vision needs to be translated into concrete and actionable requirements so we know the characteristics of a “good” design.
(nb. There are “nonfunctional” design problems for which the Design Pyramid is not meant to apply. Designs that are primarily about aesthetics, emotions, taste, and fashion operate under a different set of rules. I would not look to the Design Pyramid for guidance on composing a song, writing a screenplay or painting a mural.)
Where do breakthrough products come from?
Breakthrough products come from from breakthrough insights. The spark happens at the Understanding level and bubbles its way up the Pyramid, inspiring the vision that guides the requirements that guides the design. Let’s look at one such breakthrough product, the iPod.
Apple noticed that early MP3 players played music well enough, but getting songs on the device was excruciating. The quirky transfer software was hard to manage. Transferring large audio files over USB 1.0 was slow as molasses. And the solid-state devices of the day had such small capacity that you had to do that painful music management often, or be limited to the same couple of dozen songs. These were the core insights at the Understanding level.
The iPod vision was sculpted to address these problems: make music management easy with great desktop software (iTunes); make transfers fast (using Firewire) and make transfers rarely necessary (with a high-capacity, hard-drive based player). On top of this, Apple understood that the that gadgets you are seen with are a reflection of your style and that an MP3 player should look and feel cool.
Their easy, fast, high-capacity, cool iPod was a breakthrough product that still owns the market, years later.
If you examine other breakthrough innovations, you will find this same pattern: key insights into customer needs leading to radically different problem definition (visions), translating into unique requirements. When this is followed through with excellent design (not to mention engineering, marketing, sales, distribution and support… you know, the easy stuff) you have got a pretty good shot at a breakthrough product.
There is heaps more to say about all of this, so stay tuned!
Email or link to this article at: StealThisIdea.com/articles/design-pyramid.
Philip Haine is a product vision specialist and founded Obvious Design, LLC in 1997 in San Francisco. Thanks to Michael Poremba and David Cortright for reviewing earlier drafts of this article.
Please send comments or questions to me at phaine at steal this idea dot com, or in the comment area below
If you would be willing to translate this article for others who speak your language, please contact me.
Thoughtful article:
In my view
Co-creating the Vision of how the ‘work-product’ will benefit the users seems to be the strongest ‘barrier’ to mediocre/incremental design that delivers little value (to anyone- developers, users, etc.). As people’s uncertainties press them to be less radical the vision can be used to re-invigorate the team…and challenge gatekeepers who are using yesterday’s criteria to measure tomorrows winner…we can ask “good idea but are will it be adventurous enough to achieve our vision?”
Thanks for the thoughts, Tartle… here is how I paraphrase it:
- Uncertainties over what to do lead to indecision and therefore lack of “boldness” on the vision and therefore mediocre products.
- The “old guard” tends to use outdated criteria to judge ideas
- Involve the product team in defining the vision to re-invigorate everyone
- Define the vision in terms of user needs. This is starting with the end in mind, rather than defining the next product relative to where we are now.
- If the team drifts back towards incrementalism, offer the reality check question: is this bold enough to fulfill our vision?
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[...] that competitors leave behind. (These are key elements of the Understanding layer of the Design Pyramid.) This insight leads to great product visions. Important unmet customer needs are addressed far [...]