The perfect lap in product design
In last week’s article on believing in the possibile, is a beautiful scene from Ford v Ferrari. Ken Miles says:
Out there is the perfect lap. No mistakes. Every gear change. Every corner. Perfect. — Can you see it? — Most people can’t. Most people don’t even know it’s out there. But it is.
In product design
Every feature comes with twists and turns of new information, cross-functional teams and changing priorities. As designers we have 9 gears to navigate a feature. Expertise is in how smoothly we shift up and down these gears in response to twists and turns.
The gears
The context [30 min]
Flow & scope [30-90 min / iteration]
User stories [30 min]
Sketches [30-60 min / iteration]
Functionally simple flows [2-4 hrs / iteration]
Usability test [2-4 hrs / iteration]
Visually stunning flows [4-8 hrs / iteration]
Engineering handoff [2-4 hrs / iteration]
Design QA [2-4 hrs / iteration]
Using the gears in practice
Say we start a feature at gear 1, work our way up to gear 6 pretty quickly, and run a usability test. We realise we missed a whole dimension of user stories.
Expertise is in shifting down to gear 3 to update the user stories, and working our way up to gear 6 again.
What we don’t do is attempt to shift up to gear 7 anyway and solve it at the visual design fidelity.
Time / iteration is the point of diminishing returns in my experience. It’s enough time to complete a meaningful iteration and review with the team. Higher the fidelity or gear, longer it takes because we’re working with more detail.
At the end of an iteration, review with the team. One of two things will happen. We discover new information or build more confidence in the approach. Both are invaluable. And skipping reviews in my experience is just as costly.
Getting really good
Each gear feels different. For example, data, impact and scope discussions of gear 1 contrast with the lightness and hierarchy discussions of gear 7. Expertise at each gear is in the ability to start, time-box, diverge, converge and stop with intent.
Repeating each gear. We will often need to iterate many times over at a single stage because we haven’t fit everything in just quite right yet. We accept it, reset the timer and go again.
Shifting down gears. In our reviews and tests we will continuously discover new information. This is a good thing. We should be able to respond by shifting down without feeling annoyed or frustrated when this happens.
Shifting up gears. When it’s time to shift up, in the excitement, we tend to skip gears. Often the user stories one, or the usability one, or the visual design one. Every time I have skipped, I realised later that I shouldn’t have. And everytime I’ve shifted up to the correct level, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. But like any expertise, it’s hard until it’s second nature.
As it becomes second nature we start to see speed, clarity, collaboration and quality of every feature go up without compromising any of the axes. This the perfect lap I aspire to every week for me and my team.