Update: A day after writing Our Future Health (Outsider Service Assessment), and having slept on how positive and possibly overexcited it might come across.

While this may be the case, I’m going to leave the post as it is rather than trying to tone it down.

As I wrote in the post, I think we need to be more constructive when we moan, and further to that, more celebratory when we do encounter things that work well.

I often tell people that my goal as a user centred designer, is to make things invisible. To design interactions and experiences that people find so easy, that they seem obvious.

If you’re in the industry though, you’ll know that this is no mean feat. Even designing basic interfaces and services is something that companies and organisations still stumble on all the time.

The idea of a Norman Door is tantamount to this. Or think about contemporary tap/faucet design, and the last time you encountered taps in a public restroom which were bafflingly hard to use.

The fact that we still can’t even get taps and doors right most of the time, should illustrate how oddly hard design is. And to this end, I really do think that we need to acknowledge when people do it well.

Or, at the very least, think a bit more deeply about the challenges that may have been faced by the people behind the services, interfaces and interactions that we think are bad.

There is so much more to be learned by reflecting on and sharing the challenges we face in the design process.

These thoughts are part of a larger thread in my mind at the moment, around a more scientific approach to the design process. That is to say that we should apply more effort into publishing our hypotheses and objectives at the start of projects, and openly reviewing them at the end, no matter the outcome.

I’m imagining an All Trials-like effort for the design world. All Case Studies, perhaps. But, more on that another time.

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Thanks to Stu for helping me process these reflections.