Why to avoid vision-led design
Don’t do it!
As a design director, people look to you for the big ideas and the end goals: the vision. I have often found myself in a compromising position when team mates looked to me for the answers… and I had nothing.
Being expected to know the answers is possibly the most difficult part of being a design director—and possibly why this job title shouldn’t exist in this form. “Director” implies you’re the Steven Spielberg of design, and you’re really not.
Maybe its possible for film directors, but it is not the role of a design director to envision a perfect solution upfront. There is no script! A design process could take you in any number of destinations, many solutions, many possibilities. Let’s be honest, how do you actually know that your vision *based on your own assumptions* is going to work when put in front of your users?
It is going to be difficult to tell your team this, but early on you have to make it clear that there is no vision. In fact, design thinking does not involve a vision, and rarely is that a user-centred way of doing things.
Vision-led design is based on assumptions.
Design thinking is a constant testing and validation of assumptions.
I remember when I first became a design director, it was a big jump for me and I actually wasn’t sure how to negotiate this issue. I did a lot of Googling. I found an old interview with an established design director at a famous agency who believed firmly in, “making decisions and living with your decisions”.
I bought into this at the time — it sounded cool. But now, I can’t think of a worse scenario than living with a poorly made decision that works for no one. I think that interview summed up everything wrong with a vision-led design mentality.
Unfortunately, I think that advice led me down the garden path, and into the rose thorns. Because the output of our work was all based on assumptions.
The truth is that nothing in design should be done like this, and you should really be making decisions based on evidence.
Less of a crystal ball, more of a compass.
Where visions are useful.
I am not proposing organisations stop using vision statements at all, I would like to draw a line: A vision is entirely appropriate to inspire people.
“I imagine a world where climate change is no longer a threat to our children” is of course a powerful idea. But while this vision is incredibly motivational it is not about the processes that you will use, or the necessary goals to get there.
I am talking about the problem that many organisations fall into: using a “product vision” to actually inform product design. Building a product based on pre-supposed ideas of what the product is and how people will use it can be very problematic. This is what I mean by vision-led design.
At the most, a vision can be a guiding star, it should remain on the horizon, but should not be seen as a “solution”.
Another caveat: Solutions are soluble.
Like the word “vision”, the word “solution” is problematic when used in product design too. It implies several things to me: a final, ideal outcome. However, a solution is never really any of these things.
While your solution probably solved some problems in the present, it won’t be ideal forever. The context and conditions surrounding your solution are a moving target. As soon as you release it, your solution will already be obsolete.
Create certainty quickly. Iterate regularly.
If you simply replace the word “solution” with “iteration” you begin to build the right mindset. All design methodologies require iteration as a core process and it is a far more realistic goal. All of these methodologies in fact:
Agile, Lean, Design Thinking, User-Centred Design, and more.
You may have heard of these processes but have not used any in practice. If you are a designer, I would recommend that you begin to read about Lean UX. This is a nice methodology to validate ideas. You also get into an iterative mindset very quickly.
🔮 Avoid vision-led design!
A company building on vision alone is potentially a high-risk, high-stress environment. In my experience, it is also more likely to be a dictatorship. It is likely to be built by those who have a disconnect with the reality of their users and their staff.
Iterative companies are intrinsically more collaborative and empathic. This is the model for successful, human-centred design.
