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UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design

Tiffany Eaton
UX Planet
Published in
8 min readJun 26, 2017
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/wiki/Interaction_Design_Framework

During the past few weeks of my internship, I felt stuck and unmotivated. I didn’t know what I should be doing or if the work I was doing was worth the time I put in. How could I make the most of my time? I only have 12 weeks was the thought I prioritized over everything else. I felt so pressured by time to make something as fast as possible that I didn’t take time to let the learnings surrounding my project and the company sink in, and how I could use them to give me direction on my project. Thankfully, my manager, J.B. Chaykowsky, saw that I was struggling and suggested I synthesize everything I had learned so far. We were able to break down my learnings and start distilling them into constraints or “truths” surrounding the problem I am currently trying to solve. This experience has changed my mindset of how I approach design and my process.

When you frame the problem, it allows you to see the big picture of different directions you can take with your approach and evaluate your design with principles

An article Dan Brown wrote about practical design discovery really resonated with what my manager was trying to help me do. This was to frame the problem and take a design direction which would help me see a big picture of the what, who and how of…

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Responses (9)

What are your thoughts?

UX is Grounded in Rationale, not Design

Understanding the problem is part of the design process. Good design solves real-life problems. “Making products look good” is important, but only one small aspect of design.
Design (or synthesis) is really just a theory — a guess at what users…

I have been talking to a lot of people and writing down everything I learned so far, but writing isn’t the same as understanding. I was not using that information to generate understand...

57

The italicized bit makes sense, especially if you can re-frame it as: “Writing is a tool toward understanding, but not the understanding itself.” A variation on Alfred Korzybski’s:
The map is not the territory.

Great insights! It sounds so simple and obvious that you have to understand the problem and your users’ problems first before jumping into design solutions, but I’ve found myself guilty of this anyway. I think I get stuck in my designs because it’s…