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.
Each layer is only as good as those below it. The Design Pyramid model zeros in on why many products and designs fail, and suggests what needs to change in the product creation process to achieve breakthrough products.
The Design Layer
The Design layer is simply the solution to a design problem.
The form this solution takes varies depending on what the system being created. For software products, the solution includes the user experience architecture, the interactions, conceptual model, and even the internal software architecture. For a process design, the output is a process map. For public policy, it’s a legislative bill.
The Requirements Layer
Whereas the vision gives high-level guidance on what the design must achieve, the requirements play this out in enough detail to give the team concrete criteria for designing and building the product.
In typical processes the requirements are a big, difficult deal. That’s because the problem of stating specific design requirements is typically confounded with the very different, and more difficult problem of defining the vision. Doing them both at once is like trying to paint a room while deciding on a paint color.
When the vision is clear and correct, the requirements fall out easily. If the vision is flawed or incomplete, the requirements are difficult and bound to shift radically.
The Vision Layer
The vision establishes which problems the design should solve. Put another way, it establishes which specific set of customer needs we will 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. In the best case this wastes time and energy. In the worst case, the ship runs out of supplies and never makes it. With a badly chosen destination, the journey fails even before it begins.
And so it goes with products: a faulty vision dooms the initiative before it sets off. When you see requirements shift repeatedly, or when you see a product get canceled just before or after launch, it’s a sure sign that the vision was fundamentally flawed from the get-go.
Fundamental flaws in the vision often trace down to missing or erroneous assumptions, which reside in the Understanding layer below.
The Understanding Layer
To get somewhere new and worthwhile destination, you need a complete and accurate map of the territory. 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. While that is a pretty broad definition, there is a core set of stuff that we need to understand regardless of what it is we are creating:
- 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.
The level of our understanding determines the upper bound of the vision. A shallow understanding of these domains will beget shallow, unimpressive product visions. Breakthrough understandings in several of these areas (especially #1 and #2) is what leads to breakthrough product visions.
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 is only as good as those below it. If the requirements don’t make sense, then neither will the design. If the vision is flawed, the design will be irrelevant because the product is solving a problem that is unimportant to customers. If the understanding of customers and their needs is flawed, it will misinform the vision.
Great product design is elusive not because of flaws in the design effort but because of inadequacies at the lower two levels of the Pyramid: Understanding and Vision.
The vision layer gets especially short shrift in common practice, despite its influence. Organizations have teams that are are eager to get paddling, and they rarely allot time to properly formulate a map and chart a course to a worthy destination.
Some organizations do put effort into arriving at breakthrough product visions. But they often lack a way to think about and solve such problems, and the results fall flat. It’s not their fault — the concepts and methods for systematic product vision are not yet well established (something I am working to rectify!).
Product vision is 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.
I’m using the term “product” in this article, but the Design Pyramid also applies to any functional design problem including interaction design, information architecture, services, database design, new process workflow, retail store layout, public policy, architecture, legislation and much more.
All of 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 high-level vision needs to be translated into concrete and actionable requirements so we know the characteristics of a “good” design.
(nb. 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 always come from from breakthrough understanding. The spark happens at the understanding level and bubbles its way up the Design 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 batch of MP3 players played music well enough, but getting songs on the device was excruciating. Transferring large audio files over USB 1.0 was slow as molasses and the quirky transfer software was hard to manage. This was a real problem because the solid-state devices of the day had such small capacity that you had to laboriously transfer new music on often, or be left listening to the same thirty songs over and over. In reality, most of those devices ended up gathering dust. 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 (see the product vision hall of fame), you will find this same pattern: key insights into customer needs (understanding) 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) the stage is set for a breakthrough product.
There is heaps more to say about product vision, so stay tuned!
The permanent link for this article is: http://stealthisidea.com/articles/design-pyramid
Philip Haine is a product vision specialist and founded Obvious Design, LLC in 1997 in San Francisco. If you would like help formulating a breakthrough product vision for your company, please get in touch.
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.
Thanks to Michael Poremba and David Cortright for reviewing earlier drafts of this article.
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 [...]