Overcoming Perfectionism: Embracing Design Thinking
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that being a perfectionist is necessarily a bad thing (I say this as a self-diagnosed perfectionist); but it is definitely a double-edged sword. I realized this the last time I applied for an internship and I put “attention to detail” on my resume. When I got to the interview, and was asked the generic interview question “what are your three greatest strengths?” my first answer was “attention to detail.“ Out of modesty, I’ll leave “strong work ethic,” and “problem solving skills,” for another blog post. When the asked “what would you say are three of your greatest weaknesses"?” I quickly responded with “perfectionism.” I’ll leave the other two for yet another blog post…
I distinctly remember in that moment finally making the connection that what I considered my greatest strength (attention to detail) and my greatest weakness (perfectionism) were actually the positive and negative of the same trait. At this point in my college career, I had just spent a semester co-producing and co-directing my senior thesis project with another classmate, and had been made acutely aware of my strengths and shortcomings as a “team player.”
Shortly before the semester in Los Angeles, I took a class about Design Thinking, which I found immensely enjoyable. I took the class over J-Term, which meant that it was more of an introduction to design thinking than a full course, and as such we didn’t necessarily have the time to let the principles fully sink in. That said, I found that the fundamentals that were established were enough to help me change my approach to creative projects and help me avoid some of the pitfalls of perfectionism.
Design Thinking Defined
To put it very simply, design thinking is essentially taking the process of design (whether you are creating a product, designing a graphic or writing a social media post) and centering it around the user-experience. The wants and needs of the customer (the person who is ultimately going to use/consume a product) are foremost on the mind of “design thinkers,” who refer to this as empathy. This means examining what I (the designer) want in a desk chair, asking other people what things they like or dislike about their desk chairs, and trying out lots of different desk chairs personally to see which designs work well and which don’t.
Another tenet of design thinking is rapid prototyping. A huge barrier to innovation is trying to get make something perfect along every step of the way. It’s very easy to forget that the value of creating a prototype is that you can test it to find weaknesses and strengths - and then to move on to the next prototype. And while it is good to have a prototype that reflects the final design, making the prototype perfect is ultimately a waste of time, because you will most likely discard it and move on to the next iteration. Hence, design thinking encouraged rapid prototyping - creating simplified, quick versions of your design that are just good enough for you to test your concept, allowing you to move on to the next iteration more quickly and efficiently.
A Revolutionary Concept
When I first took the design thinking class, I remember thinking “isn’t this just common sense?” Why is this being treated as such a revolutionary concept? Of course you should put yourself in the mind of the customer when you’re designing a product, how else would you design a product or experience that another human being is meant to consume?
Since leaving college and encountering the “real world” I have come to conclude that, yes, it is indeed a revolutionary concept. I have now dealt with enough unreliable equipment and unusable software to realize that many mainstream companies don’t put a lot of thought into how real living people actually utilize their products in the real world.
Maybe the most common example I can come up with is drop down menus. Day in and day out, I utilize a lot of software. Website design software, e-commerce software, video editing programs, you name it. I have noticed a disturbing trend in the last couple of years for these companies to start hiding buttons and information that I regularly use behind drop-down menus. Now the main point of a drop down menu is to save space. But in almost all of these cases, the space being “saved” is equivalent to a few pixels, if that. Half the time, it seems like the button for the drop down takes up the same amount of space as the item they’re replacing. I’m seeing this happen everywhere, across all kinds of different programs. Features that used to just be visible immediately are now one or more clicks away. I can only think of two possible motives for this. Either the software developers are deliberately trying to slow down my efficiency and make their user-interfaces more difficult to navigate or (and I suppose this is more likely) they’re updating their software for the sake of updating it without really thinking about how people use their software on a day-to-day basis.
Perhaps a more tangible example that more people are starting to talk about is the design of modern vehicles. Aesthetic choices aside, there is a concerning trend of automotive designers using touch screens in the center console of their vehicles rather than physical buttons. While this feels like a logical step forward considering the screen-dominated world we live in, there is an additional side effect to it. Think about sitting in a car, barreling down the highway at 65 mph, and you want to turn on the heater. In an older car, you would simply push the button and turn the temperature knob and you’re all set. This is very easy because you’ve simply memorized the static position of the buttons and knobs in your center console, and you have physical feedback (because they’re physical controls) that you have successfully pushed the button and turned the knob to the correct position. You don’t even have to look down.
Contrast this with a brand new car that has all these features controlled by a touch screen. (If it is in fact winter and you live in the midwest, you have to start the process by taking off your gloves.) You haven’t memorized the location of the buttons and knobs because they aren’t static, physical controls, they’re buttons on a screen (and probably hidden behind a few different drop down menus). So after going to this menu, then than one, then one more, you now adjust the slider to your desired temperature. Hopefully you are able to do all of this without losing control of your vehicle and driving off a bridge while you were looking at the screen.
If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.
So if design thinking makes so much sense and works so well, why isn’t it common practice?
Well, there are a lot of reasons. Money is one. Time is another. (Though time technically is money, so I guess it’s just one reason.) The design thinking approach takes time to do research, surveys, prototyping and testing. A lot of designers and artists aren’t given that luxury. And while I would argue that it’s a necessity and not a luxury, corporate executives and accountants often don’t see it that way. In the above example with automotive controls, part of the motivation for manufacturers to start putting screens in cars is because it’s actually cheaper to default to a touchscreen than it is to design, make and install physical buttons. And consumers went along with it because screens are cool. But now that we’re starting to see the drawbacks, manufacturers are starting to fall back on physical buttons rather than risk the lawsuits.
But aside from time and money, there’s also a certain mentality that has to be broken for people and companies to see the value of design thinking. To truly embrace design thinking is to embrace humility and failure. Two things that corporate America doesn’t really know how to deal with. You need humility to understand that you don’t know everything and accept feedback from outsiders who review your work. You need to embrace the failure of prototypes and rough drafts along the way in order to learn from them and move on.
How I Utilize Design Thinking Concepts
While I don’t use a formal design thinking “process,” I try to utilize some of these concepts in my work. I always try to make videos and write posts from the mindset of the viewer, in this case a customer to one of my clients. This means thinking about my client’s target audience: their age, their interests, their income level. When I design graphics, I will employ “rapid prototyping” by creating several rough concepts and showing them to the client in the very early stages of concepting. This keeps me from spending lots of time on a concept that they ultimately don’t choose. Once I have feedback from them, it usually gives me a direction to go in and that’s when I start refining things.
I have discovered that I’m a very iterative designer. What I mean by that is I will create a version of a design (be it a script, video edit or a logo design), take it up to a certain “point of no return,” then duplicate it and start making changes, This approach keeps me from being afraid to make drastic changes to the original design that will be hard to undo if I decide to go in a different direction and gives me the freedom to try “off-the-wall” things. This gives me the freedom to experiment and I won’t have any nagging regrets of concepts left unexplored. If the client doesn’t like it, it’
I actually think that design thinking has had the most impact on the way I edit videos. It’s very easy to fall in love with an edit, causing you to overlook flaws that other people who are outside the project will more readily point out. There are always shots that I personally want to keep in the edit that ultimately don’t belong there. The viewer’s interest and attention span is ultimately more important to preserve than my “love” of the piece. I have to watch the video through the eyes of someone who has never seen it, and more importantly someone who didn’t shoot it. This is why showing a video edit to a test audience (even if it’s only a test audience of one) is so important. I find that as I watch someone else watching my edit, the edits that need to be made quickly reveal themselves.
It has definitely taken a while for me to realize the value in these lessons, but as I have come to embrace the principles of design thinking as part of my creative process, I have found more enjoyment in my work and more confidence in my ability to do it. It allows me to quiet my inner perfectionist and put some distance between me and my work by trying to view it objectively.
Cheers,
Mary
P.S. If you’re interested in learning more about this concept, I highly recommend one of the books I read in college, Ed Catmull’s “Creativity Inc.” Catmull is one of the founders of the Pixar animation studio. While he doesn’t reference design thinking directly, the approach he and his co-founders took was to eliminate creative barriers by examining human nature and how people interact in a corporate setting. Some of the measures that they took to foster an environment of creativity and inclusion seem so simple and yet they were brilliantly effective. A famous example is holding meetings at a circular table rather than a traditional long rectangular one to help everyone feel that they’re on equal footing and therefore more willing to speak up and contribute.