Try this simple trick to help you design better things

It can feel almost impossible sometimes to come up with creative ideas to create great product and service experiences on demand.

One trick I’ve taken to is to simply flip it and consider what qualities a terrible experience would have.

Imagine you were planning on giving a talk and wanted to make it enjoyable and educational for the audience.

That feels like a challenging brief.

Now consider what you’d need to deliver a really awful talk.

I reckon to do it really badly you’d need to:

• Not start on time
• Don’t tell people what you’re going to cover
• Talk REALLY quickly
• Use language that no one understands
• Don’t let anyone else speak
• Fill it with acronyms
• Make sure all the tech fails
• Make it REALLY long
• Cram your slides full of tiny text
• Take a few phone calls during the talk
• Talk on a topic with no relevance to any of the attendees
• Don’t have any breaks
• Be really arrogant and condescending to everyone
• Make anyone who asks a question feel stupid
• Have some slides so ugly only your mother could love them

Coming to think of it I think I went to a meeting like this last week! ; )

It’s SO much easier (and more fun) to come up with what would make something awful than what would make something great.

So all you need to do is create the ‘awful experience’, flip it and do the opposite.

It works nicely too when you are faced with a situation when you can’t articulate what you want (let’s imagine from a new job).

I bet you’ll find it so much easier to articulate what you don’t want.

Simple!