Using intuition in a design process
“This is my hunch, but…”
I often preface my opinion in meetings when it's not backed by user data. Even when I feel strongly about it, I hedge my bets because it feels risky to assert something that I can't fully rationalize.
In moments like this, I feel nagging tension in my mind. It is the tension between my indecisiveness and my inner voice yelling, “I know what I’m talking about. Just because it’s coming from my gut doesn't make it any weaker than if it was from data.”
Then, why do I feel what I feel?
In UX, we are taught to leave our ego at the door, and drive our decisions based on user research. This makes our opinion sound smart and irrefutable, whereas injecting our subjectivity makes us run the risk of sounding less professional.
But, what if you don’t have access to data at all? What if the data is too noisy or incongruent? Relying on data to form or validate your ideas every step of the design process is simply not realistic.
As a UX designer, you can supercharge your design process by leaning into your intuition to combat the absence of data, too much data, or every challenge in-between.
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Unpacking intuition in the context of a design process
Intuition is seemingly a slippery concept. But it doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Chances are, at every step in your design process, you’re already making lots of “intuition-led” decisions grounded in human psychology, design heuristics, or your tacit knowledge about users.
These are so deeply ingrained in your brain that you don’t need to reason about it. It's a mental shortcut stemmed from your lived experiences and knowledge gained along the way.
If you dig a little deeper and dust off your “intuition chest”, you might find the reasoning behind what feels right in your gut in many cases.
I find it almost comforting to label my experiences as a foundation of my intuition. I feel like it gives my opinions a solid ground and a permission for me to assert them with more confidence.
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Developing intuition with conscious effort
If our past experiences and deep-seated knowledge in our brain are what feed into our intuition, it’s reasonable to believe that we can develop and fine tune it with effort.
But it’s not without your consciousness. Here are just a few ways to make a conscious effort to develop your intuition.
Reflect on and learn from the past project outcomes, whether successful or not. Backtrack what made it how it turned out to be. You’ll find the patterns that you can extrapolate when a similar situation or problem comes to you.
Take notice of what makes “good designs” good. Extract the patterns you observe. It’ll give you heuristics to base off of your design decisions across a wide variety of problem spaces. Do the same for the “bad designs”.
Stay curious about your users. It’s easy to lose sight of their needs and mental model when “taking orders” from your product manager who defines user requirements, or getting caught up in the UI details. The more you internalize the knowledge about your users, the more likely your “intuition-led” ideas will be to benefit them.
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Leveraging intuition to supercharge your work
You’ve nurtured your intuition through mindful reflection on your experiences (first or second hand). Now what? How can your design process benefit from it?
As a designer, what makes us powerful as much as data does is our ability to:
Form a sensible opinion in the absence of data
Synthesize messy data and turn it into something useful and actionable
Interpret what users say they want to unearth their underlying desires
In all these scenarios, inviting your intuition helps us expedite our process. It saves us from staring at a blank paper or getting bogged down with analysis paralysis with little progress.
In using your intuition, one key thing to remember is you should own it. Own it by holding yourself accountable for the end-to-end lifecycle of your hunch—from exercising it, to testing it, to deciding on the go or no-go of your idea. Hold onto it tight but let go of it when it’s proven to be wrong.
This is how you initiate the virtuous cycle of learning that a design process is all about. Your intuition can provide a jumping off point and create momentum.
So, next time when I find myself uttering, “This is my hunch,” I’ll continue with an “and”—not a “but” and dig through my “intuition chest” to back it up with just enough conviction. I know this will move myself and my team an inch closer to making progress in our work.