Don’t design blindly

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, recently tweeted something that I like:

‘Innovation is hard because “solving problems people didn’t know they had” and “building something no one needs” look identical at first.’

This is true, and a real cause for so many of the products that get built that shouldn’t have.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to do very simple research to get past this problem. I wrote about this a while back on 52 weeks of UX…how to find the real problems worth designing for. The problems worth designing for are ones that you can easily observe and that people are already trying to solve: How to identify the best design problems