How necessary is it to have a plan?

In the world of design, the user is pretty important. It’s no wonder that designers always try to create the best user experience they can. After all, if the user doesn’t like using your service, they won’t. For this reason, most designers will spend a lot of time getting into the heads of their users to try to build the perfect experience. Developing user personas, user stories, stitching together wireframes, defining views, and preparing prototypes are all steps that designers take to ensure that users actual want to use whatever they’re producing. But is it all necessary? Sometimes.

First off, why do designers spend so much time preparing to design something, instead of just designing it and spending that time to iron out the problem areas? Wireframes are quick, low fidelity mock-ups of what you plan the site or app to look like. They help you position things and visualize what each view is going to look like. Making changes to a wireframe is easy because of the aforementioned low fidelity. It’s as simple as moving a square around a page, whereas if you wait until the end of the design process to change things, you may need to completely rework your code.

But what about high fidelity prototypes? Those require a lot of effort to make, and will usually be modeled off of what you defined in your wireframe. Prototypes help differentiate themselves from wireframes because prototypes actually have some sort of functionality that resembles the finished product. If you’re going to go through all that trouble to make it just like the real thing, why not just make the real thing? The answer to this question isn’t as cut and dry as it is with wireframes.

Depending on the complexity of a project, a prototype may not be necessary. If a project only has alittle user input and is fairly strightforward, then a prototype may be an unnecessary half-step. However if an app gives users a lot of options and allows them to explore a wide set of features, a prototype can provide valuable feedback as to how someone would react to the app for the first time. You may find that it would be best to completely overhaul a portion of a design because users are responding to it the way you thought they would. In a full-blown, production-level final product, a huge change like this can be difficult, so if you can root out the problems ahead of time, you’ll end up better off.

So let’s pretend you have infinite time. You somehow managed to find the world’s most patient client and there are no other worldly forces prohibiting you from taking all the time you need to produce a product. Is it still beneficial to plan your design ahead of time? I still think so. By preparing user personas and user stories, you can try to get into the heads of potential users. The reason this is helpful is because you can envision problems or concepts that you otherwise wouldn’t design for. Even if you arrive at an end product your satisfied with, you may have missed some helpful features because you didn’t properly plan and brainstorm.

So think about what your plan is next time you’re designing a new app. Is it worth a few brainstorming sessions and extra design steps now to avoid massive headaches and complications later?

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