How to quickly onboard for a complex project?
You might be surprised by the skill I use most frequently in my design process. No, it's not my competence with Figma or Miro. It’s actually learning quickly.
Welcome to this week's 🔥 subscriber-only 🔥 edition of Alex's Camp. Each week I explore design’s interplay with product, business, and technology, and answer your questions about freelancing, career, and personal growth.
You might be surprised by the skill I use most frequently in my design process. No, it's not my competence with Figma or Miro. It’s actually **learning quickly**.
You see, I think it's really helpful to be able to tell the difference between what I know and what I don't know when I'm starting to work on a new project. When I start something new, I start by typing out what I already know. This may take the shape of a bulleted list, a user-point-of-view script, or something similar to a blog post. The important thing is that it expresses my knowledge concisely.
After outlining the most evident facts I can trust, I start outlining my assumptions. These are obviously near to the truth, but in actuality, I'm not sure.
As an example, let’s say I’m working with a product that handles complex data flows. A fact that I know is that people spend days and weeks manually creating those data flows. That’s a lot of work and is very time-consuming. I also know that they use tools like GitHub and Airflow, which means the experience for the product should be similar so that these people feel familiar with it.
Now I can assume from that a user’s point-of-view, and my own experience, it can be tricky to work with different types of workflows. I can’t even be sure about the number of different ways to build those flows!
Now I’ve identified one thing I know and one thing I don’t. I try to keep this going as long as I can to compile an extensive list. It's crucial that I don't edit, problem-solve, or, well, become stuck throughout this process. I simply keep going for as long as I can so I can get as much as I can.
“A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.” — Paul Graham
This approach inspires reflection. Whenever I tackle a challenging issue, like this post, I prefer to start by just typing. The challenge is starting with as little thought as possible and letting the words flow without going back to what has already been written. Although it might not make sense, writing in this way leads you to places you might not have otherwise gone. Drawing with pen and paper or even starting with Figma won't get you to the same place. This is how our brains actually work!
After my list is complete, I try to identify any common themes and, much like when you finish a workshop, I start organizing items and looking for trends.
Returning to the example above, that may be related to effortlessly finding the data to put into the flow, but what if it’s also related to navigating between different data flows? Or maybe looking at and preventing the errors that might occur during the process?
As designers, one of the most important skills we need to acquire is how to learn quickly. It’s not an easy task and can take months or even years to comprehend. However, we can use writing as a tool to frame and contextualize our learning.
Writing lets us identify what we know and what we don’t know. It’s the first step to take when starting or learning something new.