The quality of good design lies in its effectiveness. Your design can be as beautiful, innovative, creative or well-intentioned as it is designed, but it ultimately says nothing about its ultimate success.

As a designer, you don't always have control over how your designs are used, seen or experienced. For example, the Post-it is an unexpected success after attempting to create an adhesive bookmark to prevent it from falling out, Viagra was developed as a medicine for heart cramps, and the hamburger menu icon (three horizontal dashes one below the other) was intended to display several list options below each other. These examples have led to success but the opposite is more often the case: many of the designs end up in the trash.

If you want to improve your product, it is important to know how users interact with your design and which design choices play a role in it: does that beautiful photo, the rock-solid copy, the distinctive USPs or the smooth micro interactions contribute to its success? 

How to iteratively validate the design of your product and constantly refine it. Here are three tips to help you design validated.

Tip 1: Make sure you have a structured design process

When I started designing 15 years ago, I got my input from my manager, my feedback from my manager, and my design was done when my manager was satisfied. This resulted in a ping-pong of feedback with design adjustments that led to a design that, in retrospect, you don't quite remember what exactly you made and how the design came about.

And that is precisely what is so important when you are designing: knowing what you are making and being able to justify it afterwards and determine whether it is a good choice.

To test your design, it is important to set goals in advance and to be able to determine in the interim whether your design meets them. When you do this during the work, you make it part of your design process. If you test afterwards, you may experience this as extra work, especially if you have to go back to the drawing board when it does not meet your predetermined goals. Moreover, this comes on top of your other work and therefore does not happen in practice: you have enough other work waiting for you. Validation is a means to improve your designs, but not an end in itself.

Naming and describing your goals in advance will make you more aware of them during the design process and how to work toward them. For these goals, describe the steps and who is responsible for them. Iterative design does not mean endless ping-pong, but rather ensures that you work toward a design that meets your predetermined goals.

Tip 2 : One is better than none

It is not always possible to A/B test all your designs in advance. This doesn't mean you can't validate it. There are plenty of tools that can help you get user feedback or subject your design to user testing. 

But even if you have less time, you can always submit your draft to a friend, colleague, canteen lady or random person off the street. You don't have to assume that the feedback is statistically based or matches reality, but it can certainly give you the insight to know if you're on the right track.

Want to know more about setting up your design process or validating your design and how we approach it at Online Dialogue? Then take contact with us. 

Tip 3: Share all your results, including failures

Include your team and the organization in the results and insights you find. Not just the winners or success stories: everything. Make sure your insights are well documented. This allows the rest of the team to know what has been researched and tested in the past, but most importantly, what works and what doesn't. What doesn't work is just as important! Make negative results and mistakes made discussable. Wherever work is done, mistakes are made. The biggest mistake you can make is to keep your own mistakes to yourself so that someone else will make them again. Personally, we greatly welcome the sharing of our personal fuck-ups. My colleague Florien Cramwinckel previously wrote an article about this sharing fuck-ups. 

 _{“I never fail. I win or learn.”}

^{attributed to Nelson Mandela}