Sometimes it requires a good metaphor to understand something. A while ago, trying to conceive the nature of so-called ‘design thinking’, I was struck by the idea that the design thinking process by itself has much in common with the mechanics of the popular puzzle game called ‘2048’.
In this game, the player should merge numbered tiles on a limited 4×4 grid to obtain the final tile with the number ‘2048’. If, for example, two tiles have the same numbers and are located in one line, you can slide and pair them together into one tile with a bigger number.
The core concept is that in this game you are faced with limited space where new tiles appear every time you make a move. So, by uniting tiles you free the cells for further moves, but newly appeared tiles make you lose the space.
Design thinking in the design process is just the same. It’s a skill of connecting and uniting design entities into compact groups or integrities in order to preserve and enrich meaning in the conditions of limited space.
By applying design thinking, a designer sees possible interconnections and similarities between different parts of his design and elaborates ways of uniting them to make the interface clearer and simpler for the end user. Design thinking is a kind of inner sense of how a variety of components can be reduced without losing functionality and accessibility.
Therefore, design thinking is not some technique allowing designers to put all possible functions into one button. No. It is some vision which helps to use Occam’s razor in an accurate way of not creating new controls for the interface every time a new function or a feature appears.
Design thinking implies constant questioning, for example: ‘Do we really need a new button for this feature here?’ or ‘Hasn’t this function already been realised via existing components?’. It also means that each part of the interface on each step must be checked for its necessity: ‘Should our users actually see this element, or can we remove it without losing any sense?’
The best interface is no interface indeed. Thus, design thinking could be understood as the knowledge of how to cut the corners in the interface to almost completely remove it from the user’s path. To free space in terms of geometry and in terms of meaning.
But this is only one part of the matter. The second part is connected with reinventing. Here design thinking reveals itself in going beyond existing interface patterns — in developing new ways of interaction, which effectively reduce the number of steps needed to achieve users’ goals.
This is the moment when quantity turns into quality, the so-called ‘qualitative leap’. These leaps are not something that happens regularly. They are close to pure unpredictable creativity and need the evolution of technology against the background of interface building.
Here the designer plays a visionary, almost psychoanalytic role: they should show users what they have always wanted, but never knew about and weren’t even able to imagine — totally according to what Steve Jobs once said: ‘A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’