Never try only one option.

“If you haven’t explored multiple options, you haven’t done design.”

— Davin Granroth (a rough quote from one of my cherished design mentors)

Ever since I heard this quote, it’s stuck with me. It became one of those moments that made the design discipline “click” because it exposed the nature of the problems that designers encounter and the methods designers use to understand and solve them.

How does a designer know if the experience or product they designed is “good”? The design way is to explore multiple options, compare, critique, and test them against each other.

It’s not simply coming up with an idea only to accept or reject it. It takes deep exploration of multiple solutions, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, and then making intentional and strategically informed decisions about the path forward from those learnings.

This is how designers understand the “edges of the problem.” Despite our best attempt to create a problem statement, the edges of the problem are far more intricate than one or two sentences, or even a complex problem canvas.

What is “good”? “Good” is relative. We don’t know what’s good until it’s compared to something else that’s also good, or something that’s deemed “a terrible idea.” It’s only at this stage that we begin to understand, formulate, and outline why something is good.

This is how designers understand how well a solution solves the problem: by seeing a range of successes and failures in solutions.

Have fun exploring today! I hope you discover something incredible today.