Exploring iterative design over options

Very often, I hear designers talk about providing two or three mockups for a client and then ask them to choose their favorite. I totally get that point of view — by providing three varying concepts during the process, you’re letting the client know that you’ve explored many options and can churn out beautifully crafted designs with ease in a short amount of time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve taken this approach in the past numerous times but came to the conclusion that this isn’t exactly the best approach for designers who are building digital products.

Some exceptions

There are a few exceptions. For graphic designers who focus on branding deliverables such as logos, it does make more sense to provide options as most of the time the client will need to see various approaches to get a sense of what “feels right”.

This approach was popular at a time when ad agencies were at their peak and the Don Draper’s spearheaded creative departments. However, for digital product designers who need to work in much leaner environments in mediums such as websites or mobile applications, providing options actually works against you and is a disservice to your client. Here’s why…

You’re the professional

Presenting multiple options just doesn’t make much sense. It’s like leaving it up to the client and letting them make the final decision. Sure, in a sense they are making the final call, but don’t you want them to succeed?The reality of it all is the client hired you, the professional, to design a solution to a problem that they’re currently having.Sometimes they need to be educated on why one approach is better than the other.

By presenting more than one option to the client, you may be degrading your expertise as the designer.

Today, product designer’s have a plethora of tools and methods available in which they can use to validate design concepts such as usability or concept testing. You should be a hundred percent confident in your solution and be able to explain why you took certain approaches. And frankly, providing multiple options doesn’t appear as confident compared to presenting a single solution where you can explain every design decision you made, backed by some form of testing.

Wouldn’t a client rather be presented with a design that has been validated out in the field with real users as opposed to having to choose one of three options that haven’t been tested?

As you may have already experienced in the past, when presented with multiple options, the client will likely pick and choose elements from all of them, or even worse, won’t choose any (refer to Hick’s Law). The designer will then have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to stitch the pieces together into a “Frankendesign”. There’s also a high probability that the client will pick the concept that you didn’t want them to choose. I wouldn’t blame the client for that.

Make better use of everyone’s time

By putting all of your time and effort into one concept that you’re confident in, you save yourself time in which you can then apply towards user testing, gathering useful feedback and iterating. This is time better spent as opposed to figuring out how you’re going to merge three different designs together.

Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed times when multiple designers were thrown into the same project and tasked to work on different concepts in parallel (in silo) and most of the time not fully understanding the problem at hand nor conducting any sort of user testing. Sure, you may come out with three beautifully amazing concepts, but ask yourself this, are you truly solving a problem for the client that helps their business in the long run and making good use of their time and money? This can be a rather pricey endeavor with long term ramifications.

The focus should be around quality, not quantity.

Where does providing design options make sense?

Exploring options happens naturally when designing. One day a designer will be happy with an approach and completely change it up the next day. This is totally natural and expected. On average, a designer will iterate through a design over a dozen times. The approach is to internally work through multiple (potential) solutions to a given problem, then present to the client what you feel is the best option, alongside the results from testing that informed your decisions.

If you do have the time to provide multiple concepts and fully test every one to see which one performs the best (focusing on some pre-determined criteria) then by all means have at it! But from my experience, this is never the case. The client needed the designs yesterday.

Setting better expectations

During the initial stages of the client engagement, explain to them how the design and feedback loop will work. This is crucial! I typically will let them know that they will only be presented with a single concept in which will be iterated on numerous times until everyone is happy. Most clients will be fine with that approach and will actually appreciate the involvement as they’ll have the opportunity to see a design evolve through the entire product design process.

It’s all about the expectations you set at the beginning of the project.

Explain to your client how you will work towards the best solution to their problem and will expect timely and constructive feedback from them. When later presented with a design, if they say something doesn’t work, have them articulate exactly what it is that doesn’t work and come up with a solution to be applied in the next iteration based on that feedback.

If you feel that the clients feedback or suggestion isn’t the best solution, explain to the client why and come to a middle ground. Design involves working within various constraints and a little bit of negotiation at times.

Thoughts?

I’d love to hear other thoughts and opinions on this topic! As I play mainly within the digital product design space, these are things that I’ve observed over time and have worked for me.