mike harlow

In the roles of creative director, solution architect and management consultant I've had the privilege of designing a wide array of solutions for business, media and technology initiatives. Like any work repeated with a focus on quality, efficiency and results - best-practices emerge and are refined that allow the next initiative to be more successful ...or less painful.

Over the last 18 years I've created and refined my own visual approach to software design that I call 'lead-by-design'. Why do I lead-by-design? Try to imagine someone designing a new vehicle or downtown building complex without visual designs and drawings. Can't imagine it? Either can I.

Hold on to that thought, and let's switch to software and technology projects.

Our lives are entangled with technology interfaces. Our quality and design expectations are extremely high and poorly designed software is loathed or ignored. A first impression of software is now as important and made as quickly as first impressions of a storefront or physical product. But how do many organizations still approach technology projects? With text documents full of requirements and agile backlogs of text user stories.

Look at the most successful software in the world. Was your mobile phone software created from lists of text requirements? That awesome new video game? Of course not. A visual product can't be adequately described with words and the only way to know a good design is to see it.

To be clear, I'm not saying that text requirements and user stories aren't important as supporting detail for visual designs, but they are not a legitimate substitute. And those that promote building before you have a design and claim it is a design approach generally tend to avoid communicating how much more inflexible and expensive it is. Would you start standing up a building so that you could see what you are getting?

So if we are on same page with the importance of leading with visual software design, what does a 'lead-by-design' approach look like for a technology project? At a high-level, my approach is based on two phases of work; Initial conceptual design to maximize innovation opportunities and create foundational clarity quickly, followed by a second phase of detailed design, execution and implementation cycles that turn the conceptual feature designs into high quality software.

The depth of each phase varies based on the complexity, dependencies, objectives and innovation opportunities of the specific project, but for a standard software project the following outlines my general process.

Phase 1 - Initial concept, road map and vision: The goal of the first phase is to define the core solution, implementation road map and vision that creates a solid foundation for your project or initiative before getting into detailed designs or software development.

For those looking to leverage this process, here are my key observations for this critical stage of initial design work.

• Make space to innovate: The conceptual design phase provides a rare opportunity to create space for innovation. Make sure you are maximizing on opportunities not just capturing requirements. If you are unsure how to increase the innovation in your projects, you can check out my overview on innovation.
• Show, don’t tell: We all perceive the world through our own lenses. Technical documents and long lists of requirements are not only very difficult to consume (and rarely revisited), but leave everyone to ‘imagine’ and 'assume' what the actual solution is. Use mock-ups, prototypes, diagrams and stories, and you will not only go further faster but greatly reduce the countless risks of solution ambiguity.
• Avoid just skimming the surface: The level of detail you should go to in this phase should align with the feature, integration and change complexity of the solution. As I work mainly on complex projects, I use high-fidelity mock-ups, process swim-lanes and end-to-end service designs to make sure that future-state solutions are validated, well-documented and provide the necessary foundation for business readiness, technology selection, project planning and execution.

Phase 2 - Iterative design, execution and implementation: The goal of the second phase is to use the core solution, future vision and road map from phase 1 to create release-ready designs and start executing and implementing the solution. This work is done iteratively and in priority sequence so that the highest value components of the solution are implemented first and high-quality deliverables are continually created to show progress, build and maintain momentum and drive business outcomes.

For those executing on detailed design, development and implementation of solutions, I have found the following considerations important to success

• Key resource continuity: All projects rely on the dedication, skill and solution understanding of the team. I find smaller teams of broadly skilled dedicated resources much more effective than larger teams of specialized resources. Where possible, I find it extremely important that key resources from phase 1 above continue work here in phase 2. It's just too easy for original goals, outcomes and thinking to get lost in resource transitions.
• Design investment proportionality: Designers by nature love everything to be well designed. Focus your design on areas of highest return, and where investments are unlikely to drive significant returns or can be achieved easily 'out-of-the-box', define the best way to get to 'good enough' and move on.
• Begin with what people touch and do: Modern software development environments are based on the MVC framework (Model, View and Controller). This means that there is a natural separation between the user screens or views, the process logic or controller, and the data or model. With any technology, but especially those based on MVC, there are huge advantages of building the views and high level user processes first and getting them right before you build out the model and controller. If you build everything at once, you will not only have to wait longer to see and touch the solution, but changes will be a lot more costly.

I hope you have found this brief introduction to my 'lead-by-design' methodology useful. If you would like discuss the methodology in detail or talk about some of the challenges and successes I've encountered with large complex projects, feel free to contact me.

© Copyright 2015 - Mike Harlow   updated 2016

• “If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'.” Henry Ford
• “Design is the difference between an assortment of bird parts and an eagle” Author Unknown
• “Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten” Gucci Family Slogan
• “Often, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them” Steve Jobs
• “When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design” Bruce Nussbaum
• “A huge mistake is viewing design as something done at the end to 'tidy up' the mess. It's a 'day one' issue” Tom Peters