The Journey of a Fragile Idea

As a designer, I am often very impulsive with new ideas. When I come up with a new interaction for an app I’m working on, I get an insatiable itch to share it with my peers.

In the light of inspiration, I get a natural high and run to the nearest piece of paper to sketch out my idea. The sketch is usually no masterpiece; its only purpose is to unload my idea onto paper before it fades away.

At that point, I usually involve my peers to weigh in on the idea. Their initial reaction is to struggle to understand what I’m babbling about. They’re presented with a poorly rendered, out of context sketch and a less than perfect explanation of the new idea.

After the struggle, there comes an “Ahhh, I get it” (spoiler alert: they don’t really get it). Then, they proceed to challenge the idea. It turns out the idea was not so brilliant after all. It turns out there are plenty of loopholes in the interaction and it really doesn’t fit with the long term product strategy.

This is incredibly frustrating. Here I go from thinking I have a game-changer in my head, to sitting with a crapshoot that went nowhere.

This holiday weekend, something very special happened. Moments before the end of the work day, I came to one of my epiphanies. As usual, I grabbed a piece of paper and started sketching away. However, this time there was nobody around I could grab and show my sketch to. So, I was forced to develop it further.

I kept sketching. I added more detail to it. Then, I wrote notes that described the transition between screens. Then, I drew it again. Then, I grabbed my computer, and instead of jumping to Photoshop and creating a high fidelity render of that sketch like I usually do, I opened Keynote.

I started playing around with animations using only wireframes (gray boxes and placeholder text). Then, I started writing down the reasonings behind my redesign; the fundamental principles that make this a better approach to this particular app. Finally, I decided to explain the problems with the current approach.

When I looked at the clock, it was 5AM the next day. I had spent the whole night working on this. I had reverse-engineered a presentation that explained the redesign of this particular interaction in the app.

10 hours and 30 slides later, I arrived at a solid, well-developed presentation. This was no longer a sketch on a coffee-stained piece of paper. I spent the remainder of the holiday weekend refining this idea, tweaking the animations, re-arranging the slides.

The next work day, I called an impromptu design meeting and shared the presentation with everyone on the team. By the end of the presentation, everyone had truly understood the *intent *of the idea as well as the way in which it could be executed. They recognized the problem behind the current approach and agreed to address it. They had minor comments on some of the interactions. They provided feedback on how to improve the idea even further.

By the end of the meeting, the idea had been improved, not shut down because it was the wrong approach.

Maybe this particular epiphany was just better than the other ones. Maybe this idea was just a winner. But maybe the other ideas never got the chance to flourish into presentations that thoroughly explained a problem and a solution.

In his excellent essay, Give it five minutes, Jason Fried talks about the fragility of new ideas. This is especially relevant for designers. Most of us do a poor job explaining new ideas. Some of us share ideas too early in their lifecycle only to find them shut down immediately, before allowing them to unfold.

The lesson here is two-fold:

Give ideas the time to flourish into well-developed concepts, then allow them the opportunity to succeed or fail.