How to avoid design sitting on a shelf collecting dust

Have you ever spent a lot of time on researching, designing and even documenting fresh designs only to have them never see the light of day? It just sits there on the shelf so to say, “collecting dust”? Well, you are not the only one. It is inevitable and in some ways is part of the creative process but important that it doesn’t become the norm and that it is not weighing down you and your team. This trend can create a sense of disappointment and a lack of trust. 

While working through a new design, from conception, throughout ideation and to the hi fidelity design here are five check points to make along the way to avoid design pollution. 

1) Make sure it is responding to your product’s vision 

This is the first and foremost question that you should be asking yourself when staring in the face of change. If what you are going up against is not completely aligned with your product vision, don’t force it. It is a dangerous cycle that results in the company being misaligned and in turn conveying a confusing message to end users.

Your product vision is the guiding light of what the product wants to achieve. As mentioned in, How to define a product vision the product vision impact goes all the way from product strategy and roadmap to backlog and execution/backlog. It is the foundation that needs to be aligned in all steps of the process. 

”The vision also serves as a filter to de-prioritize the things that won’t make a meaningful difference to the value of the product or experience.” - Richard Banfield

2) Make sure it is responding to a user’s need

Just because you think a solution would be better for the product does not mean that it will have a positive impact on the end users. You live and breath this product everyday. Take responsibility for your biases and leave it to the experts and data to validate the impact this change would have. 

You can rephrase your thinking from, how this would be good for the product (or feature) to how this would be good for the user. There are many techniques to make sure a user centered design approach is adapted. I would like to stress that it is quite useless if used only by designers. It is something that needs to be diffused through out the company, across various stages of product strategy and delivery. 

UCD approach used only by designers is like putting sunscreen only on your nose, in the end you are going to get burned. 

3) Make sure all stakeholders are aligned/feasibility

I have mentioned the need to work in a multi disciplinary team: PM, designers, research, web/mobile clients, backend/ai etc. digging deep into solid solutions in my previous post. The risk in not involving all stakeholders from the beginning is arriving far in the design process only to find out it would be too complicated to implement. And boom, you have a design sitting on the shelf collecting dust. 

Feasibility is a powerful factor, that must not be taken lightly. In a fast paced product company, even a slight increase in extra time needed to implement can stop the developing of a feature dead in its tracks, placing in a backlog which might as well be called, graveyard.

4) Make sure your team has the capacity to actually implement it

There will always be a lot to do combined with the limitations of time and resources. But if you have arrived this far in passing the three previous check points, the next thing to be done is evaluate who is going to work on it. It can be aligned with the vision, be user centred and feasible but if you don’t have the resources and team to work on it, the shelf is where the design will be going. 

This is often the result of having higher priority items to work on and the new design just doesn’t make the cut. Rule is try to avoid producing high level design specs unless you know that there is a dev, ready and waiting to bring it to life.

5) Make sure you have all the necessary design patterns to support it

Congrats after passing all previous check points, you have arrived to the juicy stuff. As you know the product experience needs to be built off a strong foundation of components and interactions. You may arrive to the high fidelity design to realise that you need to create a new component, that something like it doesn’t already exist anywhere in your library.

Now you are presented at a fork in the road: compromise the experience and use something that you already have or introduce a new component? It might be easy to choose the second option but as we know this means increasing development’s effort. 

This obstacle will be a lot easier to tackle if from the beginning the multidisciplinary group has been working together from the get go. Rule is don’t introduce new components with out being aligned with the developers. They will be taken by surprise and what they estimated to be only a few days of work has just doubled. 

When working in a fast pace environment in a constantly changing digital landscape, finding the right balance between the future and the now is what will help you survive. I don’t want you to think that designers should be completely tied down by the limitations of time and resources. There needs to be a balance between working in sync with the rhythm of the delivery process but also allowing yourself to think ahead and outside of the box. These moments of research and if I may dreaming are fundamental to pushing your experience to the next level.