Dot-to-Dot Design: Daunting to Doable

It’s all about the dots

A design is easy when it requires the least amount of human brain energy, effort, and will to understand, follow, progress, and learn. For the Designers reading this, the reaction is probably, “Well duh.” But I have known too many designers over the past 25 years who confused art with design, who considered information architecture “poison” to creativity, and who used terms like “cognitive load” with a near total lack of knowing what the term entails and how to mitigate it.

There are three basic challenges designers face in their effort to create an easy-to-use product:

• The amount of complex, multi-faceted knowledge for a designer to know, understand, and simultaneously apply;
• The complexity of the product to be designed;
• The characteristics and needs of the primary and secondary audiences as humans.
  (A company that I know of considers itself the world’s most “customer-centric” company in the world turns out to not be the most human-centric. Its business model isn’t so much to serve humans as to turn out products or features that “customers want.” That’s “confusing the finger for the moon,” as Bruce Lee might say. “As Humans” is a key ingredient here.)

These challenges form a trifecta of facets, each encompassing its own universe of ‘dots’. These dots represent diverse elements or nuggets of knowledge, spanning design principles, aesthetics, human factors, adult-learning theory, library science, technology, sociology, and more. Whether a dot signifies a piece of information, a design principle, or a cognitive limitation, it’s integral to our knowledge bank. As designers, it’s our task to dissect these facets, identify the right dots, and skillfully connect them together in a way that’s both attractive and functional, thus forming a comprehensive understanding and creating our unique design approach. Connect the dots, if you will.

The job of a designer involves blending knowledge from various disciplines to enable users to tie together concepts they’re being exposed to, what they see, what they need to understand, and what the results of their journey are or should be. And while this might make the role challenging and even intimidating, it’s also part of what makes it exciting and rewarding.

Designers, in essence, become ‘jacks of all trades’, dipping their toes in various disciplines to build a holistic understanding of what it means to design for humans. Just as there are dots to connect, there is knowledge to build. As we learn more, we are not just connecting dots, but building a mosaic of understanding. Each dot, whether it’s about color theory, cognitive psychology, or coding, is a unique piece that, when joined with others, helps form the larger picture of effective design.

A robust mosaic, layered with insights from various disciplines, empowers designers to solve complex problems and translate them into effective, user human-centered solutions. The challenge for designers lies in making connections between seemingly disparate areas of knowledge and constantly adapting their understanding as new trends, technologies, and research emerge. That’s where the concept of “connecting the dots” truly comes into play — it’s about seeing and leveraging the connections between different pieces of knowledge to inform design decisions.

What is Design?

In the context of this article, design encompasses both a process and an outcome. As a process, it involves the creation of a plan or specification for constructing an object or system, or implementing an activity or process. This requires a deep understanding of the problem to be solved, the vision to conceive a solution, and the skills to bring that solution to life. As an outcome, design refers to the resulting object, system, or activity that has been carefully crafted with an intended objective or purpose in mind. It’s a manifestation of the designer’s understanding, vision, and skills, created with the ultimate goal of fulfilling user needs, motivations, preferences, and objectives.

This is not to say that good design materializes monolithically or emerges seamlessly from a “waterfall” process. Much like processes in nature, design is often a product of evolution. Changes happen gradually, with each iteration building upon the last, incorporating new insights, ideas, and feedback. This iterative process of refining and revising is part of the art and science of design, as it allows for ongoing adaptation and improvement. Just as nature adjusts and evolves to meet the changing needs of various species to suit the pressures and challenges of a new context, good design can continually evolve to better serve its users and their shifting needs and expectations.