Don’t Let Ambiguity Be the Death of Your Design Project

Maria Pereda presented “Don’t Let Ambiguity Be the Death of Your Design Project” at UX Camp Winter 2021. Enjoy!

Maria Pereda

​Director of Product Design, Clio

Maria leads design at Clio, helping increase access to justice while improving the lives of lawyers. Previously, she’s led teams at Roadmunk, Schoology, Critical Mass and GE. In her spare time, which is never, Maria is learning to play guitar.

In 2018, she made a promise to never buy clothes again, and to this day, she continues to make her own clothes.

​​​The following transcript very likely contains typographical errors. Please forgive any mistakes!

So thanks for coming. And these presentation was born out of a problem, and back in August, I joined a new company to lead a new design team, and it’s in legal tech, and we deal with a lot of an explored territory, we’re building legal tools for lawyers. And the reality is that whatever you’ve seen on TV of lawyers going around with folders and nodes and spreadsheets and things like that, it’s true. They are very, very antiquated. So whatever we build today, it’s all very new, and I inherited a design team that is fantastic, but was dealing with a lot of ambiguity, and sometimes it would be paralyzing, and I found myself talking a lot about how to deal with it and be Gary and later that year, I met with a group of amazing witches, one of them is here today, and we ever talk from the ambiguity and started to see that this is a very common topic, so I thought, Hey, why don’t I take the opportunity and talk a little bit about how we can deal with ambiguity, so let’s talk about what ambiguity is and merits a situation that has more than one possible meaning and therefore may cause a lot of confusion, and as designers, all we do is deal with ambiguity, we create something concrete out of an MBS problems, the degree of ambiguity just increases as we increase in seniority, but it’s always there.

So early in my career, I started with small problems and I had this intense desire of always having the answer at the beginning, and I started to realize that that was impossible, but the uncomfortable uncomfortable-ness never went away. And as I increase in my seniority, I thought I’m gonna become more comfortable with these because I’m gonna figure out how to just deal with getting the information as we go and being able to deal with it, but what happened is that the problems became bigger, and I just did not know how to do. So I had to learn some tricks and I’m still learning them today, but what I realized is that as designers, we will never have all the answers from the start, and it’s onetime forward to find them as we go, we are forced to explore multiple solutions and go into opportunities that may be intention, how things work today and how we think about things as designers, we always need to let go of our strong opinions. When I started, I would find a solution, I would be that to the solution, I would be so married to the solution that I would go and try to disprove anything that did not go with my solution.

So I had to learn to let go of that and be okay. That there may be other things out there. So the realities of ambiguity is uncomfortable, can be paralyzing, and he will always be there, and I can either send us spinning in circles or we can embrace it and we can learn some techniques to deal with it. Let’s talk about what are the most common types of ambiguity that we can find at work, I’m not saying that’s an exhaustive list, but that’s the things that I find more on my everyday life.

So first we find biggest goals and direction, and a biggest goals in direction is when you get to work in a project and it seems like everybody on the surface is agreeing on what we’re trying to do, but everybody’s expecting something slightly different, and words that you might think… You know what they mean, mean things to different people. And when you start talking about what you are expecting out of a project, I say that they are expecting some things likely different, that’s what it means when we say ambiguity in goals in the direction. The one that I find most commonly is a biggest problems, and before we talk about ambiguous problems up word, let’s talk about weekend problems. Have you heard about them? I’m sure you have, but I’ll give you a quick definition of what they are.

Weed problems are unstructured, in that it is difficult to sort out the causes and effects and there’s little consensus in identifying what are the problems and what are the solutions. Usually, they are overlapping stakeholders with different views and perspectives on what the real problem is, and they often don’t have just one solution, so for instance, when somebody says, Why can we solve world hunger or homelessness, or Why can we just solve capitalism?

So are you gonna be asked to solve this… Most likely not. Maybe you will, and I wish you like. But the thing at work is that you will be asked to solve problems that may share similar traits, so there’ll be lower scales, but you’ll get a problem that it will be hard to know exactly what is the cost, or if there are multiple causes, and they might affect the product only, or they might affect other departments, they might affect sales, you don’t know until you find out, and it’s usually not one clear-cut action that will address them. For instance, a company that I worked in the past, they wanted to solve retention and they’re creating a Retention committee, but the more they dig into it, retention was not just one thing that one thing would solve, there were so many causes to retention, could be that the product was seasonal, so people who needed to use it would just log in once or twice a year, or could it be that the product had some basic usability problems that needed to be solved, that maybe the audience we were targeting was not the right audience, we were trying to target too many people at the same time, maybe the pricing model didn’t make sense for somebody who just wanted to come to the product like once or twice a year, or maybe it was… All those things are a little bit of… All those things combined together. So what is the real problem? That is what we call an ambitious problem to solve, the biggest Cope is one of those projects that there’s no clarity on what’s in, what’s out… You know that word that we all kinda hate, MVP, and you have endless arguments about what is in the MVP that’s on a big your scope. And then the last one, which I usually find the easiest one to solve his MBS timelines, which is what is this do…

What is this dating port and is this an arbitrary date… It is not an arbitrary date, why do we have to meet this date, etcetera, so we’re gonna walk through a few examples today in some techniques on how to address these.

So let’s talk about envious problems first, and before you get… We get started. Let’s meet allies and Bob. So Ali’s a designer and her product manager asked her to come up with an onboarding flow to drive more engagement, so I say, Okay, I’m gonna start to a few people, I’m gonna start talking to a few people internally and some users. So as goes to sales and support and realizes that they think the problem is the pricing model, and it confuses users, so they trial it and they try to get the product, but the pricing model is so confused that they leave, but then she starts doing research with existing customers and realizes that what they see in the product is one of those that you said it and you forget it, you don’t need to go back in. So this point at least is confused and she doesn’t know what the act of problem needs, so I’m gonna ask you to vote in the channel. What do you think allies does next? Option one, she creates several design iterations and you want it every time she talks to and he said, stay colder, and she will present them to Bob and her team. Option number two, she meets with Bob and present a research plan that includes two surveys, interviews with all the different stakeholders, users and some contextual inquiries and proposes to take a month to get more information, or Three, Ali tells Bob that it’s not clear to her that the engagement is the issue, and she shares a short summary of her initial fan findings from talking to all the stakeholders and existing customers, and she tells Bala, maybe we need to align on what we know and what we think, and maybe we can learn something small in the short-term and learn more.

So what do we think the answer is… And I’m gonna give you 30 seconds. I’m not gonna tell you what the answer is, but I’m gonna tell you some approaches you can take when these happens to you. So I always tell my team when they start with a problem like this, the best thing they can do is to create an inventory of information. So 2 x 2s are your friends. These knowns and unknowns, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them. I think Donald runs for Rumsfeld. I don’t know how to pronounce his last name. Made him popular. They come from the Johar window, and it’s about classifying what you know, so you have your knowns, you have your unknowns, you’ll have your known unknowns, and you have your unknowns and nose, so first, you create your known notes and those are the facts, like the things that you know, that’s what they are. The requirement is the data, the facts, then you have your known unknowns, and those are the things that you know you need to find out. So what questions do I know I need answered in order to move forward?

Then there are the known knowns, and those are the things that you might not know, but because of experience in the past, you can guess based on your experience, so for instance… Based on my experience, I can tell that if I put a video in the middle of a check-out, people will not watch it because they are busy doing something, so I don’t need to go research that, I can tell you that that’s not going to work.

And then there’s the unknown unknowns, and those are the things that I just don’t know and they need to be discovered. So with these, you already have a repository of things, so what do you do with these, you have your information organized, so you start going with, okay, with the facts I have, with my intuition, with the questions I have, can I create a set of assumptions? And from these assumptions, can I start assigning risk to them, like if I were to move forward with this assumption, would it be low risk or would be high risk, if I do X will be easy to do or will really create a Castro PHY. So next, what questions do I really need to know? And when do I need to know them? So do I need to understand how… What model of phones people use in order to move forward and do I need to know it? You know it now. Are there any blockers are preventing me from moving forward? And based on the questions that I have, can I formulate any hypotheses? And can I start testing? And from these hypotheses, what can I learn that will allow me… And the last one is, are there anybody in your organization, any means before you have to go talk to customers that you can go and can start giving you more answers, or maybe they are not facts, but they can start devising some of your assumptions. So this is going to help you get some more clarity in your information and help you to start get chipping away. So first thing we do is create a timeline, one thing that we all wish we did is having limited time, but we don’t…

So create a timeline of when. Do I need to have X, Y, Z? To keep the team moving. Because unfortunately, there’s always going to be engineering team saying, I need this now, I need this now, there’s going to be a PM saying, We need to launch, we need to launch, and there’s going to be senior leadership saying, Why is this team not producing…

You’re gonna start saying, working with your team, you’re gonna say, Okay, these are the things we feel comfortable to start moving forward with, and this is how we’re going to test some of these things, you’re gonna see if there’s anything small you can start building… That is low risk, and I’ll give you an example, for instance. Imagine a company says, We want to institute business texting, and business texting includes both allowing people to text with our company and be able to store everything and also send them reminders to get text.

One thing that is easy to know is that sending reminders via text of an appointment, it’s a very common pattern, many companies use it, and it’s widely instituted, what we don’t know is about people trying to text with our company and having conversations, so maybe we can start building the infrastructure to send reminders of an appointment via text, well, we explore everything else, and last but not least, the lay… Any big decisions that you have until you gather more information, if possible, because the more you delay, as you gather information, the more you will Therese risk, so that’s for ambitious problems, let’s talk about a biggest goals and direction, and we’re gonna go back to our friends, Bob and allies. So Alice has to be nice to work on a new project, and during the project kick-off, the product manager, Bob identifies a target persona as a technical user who needs a powerful and sophisticated solution, the team aligns on a project charter and goals based on his on this understanding and the following week, bobbing, Allison Slack, Hey, I just talked to a super important customer, and you know what, we’re gonna need to make this design super simple that even my mom can use it, because this has never happened in the world of things. So what does allied Ali is concerned, but doesn’t wanna question Bob’s direction, so she replies… Of course, I didn’t do that.

Number two, Helen goes back to her designs and starts exploring all the design directions because she doesn’t wanna show them to the rest of the team since it doesn’t align with the render standing, or number three, Alice steps away from the keyboard and takes a breather, she then replace to Bob, that’s interesting. The sounds quite from what we had agreed on with the team, should we get together with them and revisit the problem we’re looking to solve? So I’m just looking to see what you all think. I’m also not gonna tell you the answer, but I think you’re getting it… That’s right, that’s right. Don’t go back and just blindly follow what Bob tells you…

That’s correct, Helen. That’s interesting. So how do you manage these situations, one is, do we have a decider? First of all, and I know it sounds very do, but I’ve been in so many organizations that we start projects and you’re realizing the middle of it that there’s no roles and responsibilities, everything is a heard of kittens trying to decide. So go back and say, Okay, what are the roles and responsibilities of everybody in the team? Who decides what? And once we have decided that… Go back to the basics. Who are we designing for? Do we agree? Do we not agree? What are the goals of this project? Who are we trying to target? Who are we not targeting, maybe to find some measures of success… How are we going to know that this project is going to be successful? And it’s not just, if we launch, launch is not a measure of success, or if we sell more…

Document your decisions. You know what, we’re in this era of Agile where everybody is like, We don’t need to document… Documents are good, sometimes they’re almost like a contract, then you can go back where you can establish some basic tenets of your project, like what is the problem we’re trying to solve, what… How do we know that is a problem? Why is that a problem for the user? Why is that a problem for the business, what’s our target? How are we gonna know we have solved this problem, what assumptions are we making, etcetera, etcetera, and sometimes if it helps to find some design principles in this case for not Bob’s mother, we are helping the user create something… I don’t know, I did not come up with a design principle.

I’m sorry. But basically, we are not creating a product that Bob’s mother could use, so all those are things that seem very natural right now, but I see very senior teams skipping all the time there

On… I’m big your scope. This is my favorite one, because he awakened so many passions…

Oh, Alison, Bob, actually, we have Chris here.

So crazy engineering manager of the team, ALICE works with censors, Krish of an edge case, he ran into the other day while playing with the product, and he’s asking her to create a design that takes care of it so he… Team can fix it. And Ali mentioned these in passing to Bob, and Bob says, no, I actually don’t wanna do that because we’re gonna deal with it in the future, so please don’t waste your time working on it… Work on this other thing instead.

So yes, you guess that we’re gonna go see what Alice does. So what does all Dallas works on the design, Chris? As her to do and Bobbie upset with her, or Alice works on the design, bolster to do and crises upset with her.

Allis works on the design for Bob during the day and for Chris at night, and the following day, she feels stared and cranking, gets upset at her boyfriend for no reason, or Allie schedules a meeting with Bob, Chris and her manager, which she shares a detail of the two conflicting requests with her managers help Bob and craze agree on a compromise and a path forward.

That’s right. You should all do Number Four, please don’t work on the day for one and at night for the other, so prioritize, work with your partners, work with your partners to understand what are the goals, what is necessary to launch and what is a nice to-have, and how do we know what is a nice to have… Is it, can the person do the thing we established as a goal without these yes or no, how many people will be affected by these is 05% of the population and our user bases 10000 people. Yes, but is it 05% of the population in Imre user base is 20 million people? Maybe we need to think about it. What is the minimum we can ship and learn from…

Remember, there’s a backlog, and I hope some companies use it, and one thing I always like to tell my team, remember, it’s easier to add them to remove, because you will add something that 99% of people don’t use, but that 1% will call the president of your company and be very, very annoying when you try to remove it. So managing and body, I think we all learn as a team problem, Alice alone cannot manage it herself and she needs to work with her cross-functional partners, 100% certainty will never… Never, never happen. So I think that we need to embrace these and just be okay with it, and finally remember that it’s better to just be a roughly right than precisely wrong, which is what will happen if you continue trying to get all the answers ahead of time…

Thank you.