Why it matters:
Design isn’t just for designers. Every day, we make decisions that shape someone else’s experience: students, customers, colleagues, communities. We’re designing.
But we don’t always act like we’re designers, by engaging with those we’re designing for as we shape their experiences. Design helps us do it on purpose.
Go deeper:
At the risk of overstating it, I think design as a practice can change the world. Especially in a world where we can create nearly anything digital in an instant. But digital or not, when you have an experience that sucks or doesn’t make sense, I’d argue it’s the result of bad design.
I think we’re experiencing the outcomes of people in the world not taking ownership of their role as a designer. If you make decisions for other people, you are a designer.
That includes educators, program leaders, managers, founders—anyone shaping an experience for someone else.
And in my work with institutions, this is where things often break down. Not because people don’t care, but because they don’t have a shared way to design better experiences.
Since I learned and started practicing design a decade+ ago, this insight has nagged at me, and made me an evangelist to share design tools, methods, and mindsets with others to help avoid bad design. I even did some prototyping of a toolkit back in 2019, complete with “bad design” stickers to adorn on experiences you struggled with.
I was in closest proximity to education and the Education Design Lab where I got my professional start in design, a 15 min walk from my apartment in DC at the time. Meant to be :)
As a result, I’ve used design to launch new learning models, a new “branch” campus in Tucson for a DC University, and numerous prototypes in career development and work-integrated learning.
Underneath it all, it’s always been about sharing design practices, tools, and mindsets with people to give them new tools to solve problems and improve experiences. So over the next few weeks I’m going back to basics and to share practices anyone can use to combat bad design in life and work.
Get Curious: Ask and Notice
At the start, the design process is focused on defining the problem you’re trying to solve by “getting curious.”
This helps us by first getting a view of the landscape around the challenge that people are facing today and then finding the trends, patterns, and themes and narrowing the problem until it’s uncomfortably specific.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, everything in design starts here: getting curious.
Getting Curious is about understanding people and their problems. And for anyone getting started in design, it has two parts: asking questions and noticing patterns.
Asking:
To ask better questions, we have to be willing to let people describe what they’re experiencing today. If we’re too specific, people try to perform for you and give you the answer they think you want. Even better, specific stories about “the last time” someone tried to do something and what they encountered gives you really good data to start with.
Asking students question is a regular practice in higher ed, but I notice 2 consistent challenges:
We ask the same students, or students who are already in our orbit, succeeding
We ask them in formal, structured settings
Both are better than not asking, don’t get me wrong. But they miss an important nuance in user research; namely that you need to find students encountering the challenge you’re trying to address and collect accurate data about the challenges.
This isn’t just a higher ed problem. Most organizations ask the people closest to them, in the environments most comfortable to them, and end up reinforcing what they already believe.
If the environment is too polished or involves hierarchy, formality, or other relational tension, you’re not going to get good data. You’re better off stopping students on campus with a few questions and pre-qualifying an interview (with an offer to pay them for their time and insight).
Tools for asking
The Curiosity Menu: when I’m early in a new project, I want to leave as much room for the potential challenges and insight that I can gain. I create a set of “headline” topics of curiosity; I don’t attribute any specific value (good or bad) to the topics, I just list the areas that may relate to our problem space and show people the list. Then I give them space to share any information that would help me understand that topic better. Sometimes the most insightful “interviews” are invitations of curiosity to gain the perspective of people who have been thinking about the topic and have been waiting for someone to crack open the door.
Curiosity Cards: In interviews sometimes people need an invitation to go deeper, share more, or a nudge to get more specific or describe their experience. Curiosity Cards are a set of follow-up questions to nudge you to dig deeper and to track how often you ask for more information. Questions like “tell me more about that..” “tell me about the last time…” “What did that feel like…” and “Why” help us go deeper in interviews, built trust through investment, and connect like a human.
Noticing:
People share the ideal when they’re asked about what they do. They average their experience and give you something that they’re willing to be associated with socially. It’s harsh to say people “lie,” but most want to be helpful and make the problem simpler, cleaner, or less prominent. That’s why we need noticing.
This means looking at data around the problem to see trends, and then observation of the problem in action to see how people really behave. It might mean “secret shopping” a service or following someone along in their journey.
Many times it means looking for “duct tape,” or the way that people have solved the problem themselves in spite of bad design.
Tools for Noticing
Reverse Scavenger Hunt: When starting a design process, teams are often overwhelmed and unsure of how wide a net to cast. I love bringing together a diverse team and asking them to come up with as many places they can think of that we should look to help us understand the problem we’re trying to solve. And rather than naming exactly what we’re looking for, we come up with a list of the data sources, people, and places that we should get to know. It serves as the raw materials for later “stakeholder mapping” and “data gathering.” Many times I ask teams to look for FOUL: Frustration, Overwhelm, Uncertainty, and Loneliness.
Map the Intended Experience and Compare the Reality: Many times institutions already have a process in mind for how a particular experience is meant to unfold. Using this as the start of conversations with stakeholders can be enlightening to the reality.
Look for duct tape by listening to complaints: People make even bad designs work for them. Sometimes they skip steps, and other times they avoid taking action if the frustration is too strong and it’s no longer “worth it” to them. You may hear students describe their experiences this way, but more often than not it’s other stakeholders responsible for tracking how students are progressing, reporting on that program, or who designed the system to begin with. “People aren’t doing what they’re supposed to” may be a phrase you notice, and that complaint should ring alarm bells for friction; in the design, that is.
Once you’ve asked questions and noticed how people are navigating and solving their problems already, you can start to narrow in on the problem you’re trying to solve.
As you start to clarify the problem, you may need more information and double back into curiosity in new topics to keep learning and digging into the problem.
How does design help drive change?
These practices may seem simple, but they’re part of a larger engine for driving student-centered change, and it takes leaders to enable these habits of asking questions and noticing to ensure they have an impact.
Once teams notice patterns in the challenges they surface, they need leaders willing to engage, encourage, coach, and advocate for continued noticing.
Then as teams devise new plans, they need to feel the advocacy to try and learn from new approaches and the reduction of friction that can be made with informed leadership decisions made in the spirit of trying new things and learning.
With these practices in place, teams can create design-driven change on campus.
Design-driven change doesn’t come from “better ideas,” it comes from better human-centered habits: asking better questions, noticing what’s really happening, and creating environments where people can act on what they learn.
And it not just for “designers,” it’s for anyone responsible for shaping experiences for others.
Up next, we’ll build on this foundation and explore what it looks like to turn curiosity into clear, actionable problems worth solving.
Up Next: What’s Possible
Next week I’ll share tools for clarifying the problem you’re trying to solve and ensuring that your ideas are meant to solve the problem, not just make you feel smart. We all love our ideas, but that doesn’t mean they’re helpful in solving the problem the other person is experiencing.
A quick note:
If I can be helpful sharing more about these ideas with you or your team this summer or helping your team build these habits in practice…reach out. I’m starting to nail down dates in the Summer and Fall, and I’d love to bring this conversation to your campus as a workshop, training, or keynote! Just reply to this email, I respond to all of them!
If this resonates, share it with someone building student-centered change. Share with colleagues or leaders you trust dedicated to driving change in education.
In learning,
Thank you for being part of this community of over 1,500 curious, creative, changemakers who believe we can improve the student experience through design.
Brian LeDuc is the founder of Learning, Designed, where he serves as a design strategist partnering with learning organizations to improve the learner experience and drive change co-designed with students, educators, communities, and employers.
