The Three Step Process That Solves All Problems
The most simple of all engineering processes is one that has universal application anywhere there is a problem to be solved. It doesn’t matter if the problem is an airplane that needs to fly with greater fuel economy, a cell phone that needs to be 1 mm thinner, or a race that needs to be run 1 min faster, this basic, iterative process can get you there. Almost every design process in existence is a variation on this same theme. If you are comfortable with these basics, everything else are details that supplement, fill in the gaps, and enhance what you already know.
Design
If you’re not an engineer or part of a product development team, you may be unsure of what design really means. You may be thinking of interior design, fashion design, visual design, or a host of other creative pursuits. The word is often stuffed in a box in an attempt to contain its definition to one that only applies to artists. But its reach is so much broader than that. Anyone who creates, must be a designer in some way. It doesn’t matter if you’re creating cookies, music, a house, spreadsheets, chemical compounds, business strategies, legal arguments, lesson plans, workflows, software, rockets, or your own breakfast, you put on the designer hat to get there.
The design step of the process can take a split second for those simple creations that come on a whim, or it can take years for complex feats of engineering like a space program. But the design is all the thought, planning, and preparation that leads to the next step of actually creating the thing. That design can start as simple sketches to outline the concept, and then solidifies into intricate 3D models that can be used to simulate physical parts made of real materials. Those models can be analyzed to predict whether they will perform as intended. These may transition to drawings that state explicitly exactly how a part can be made, from the material to the manufacturing process to the minute details of each and every feature.
If you’re not building a physical thing, you can think of the design process as a plan. If you’re writing a book, it may start with an outline and proceed to a rough draft. That draft gets cut up and rearranged into a cleaner draft, which then goes through a few more revisions before finally being published. Even if the name is slightly different, that planning process is the design process. At the most fundamental level, you are now a designer!
Build
The second step in this three step process is to build. This means to create a working draft of your idea, product, or solution to your problem. These prototypes can range wildly in their fidelity from a paper mock up of a building to be built to a drivable model of a new car to be released. In the case of a process or other non-physical product, the prototype could be trying out your solution once to see how it fits. You can try out a yoga session in the morning if you are trying a non-caffeinated way of waking yourself up in the morning.
Whatever you’re trying to achieve, this model gets you one step closer to comparing reality to your design or plan. Does the size match your expectation, does it work as quickly as you’d hoped, does it even come close to all the designing and planning effort you put in for the first step?
The answer to most of those questions is probably ‘no’. But that’s ok. The point of the build step is to translate a plan into reality. You finally have something to evaluate, to try on, to show off. Now you can take it to the last step, and test it out.
Test
The final step in the process is to use your solution. If you’ve made a product, you try it out. The most important part of the testing phase is to compare the performance of your object, process, or solution against the problem you set out to solve in the first place. Did you create an app to streamline your meal planning needs? Does your app let you make plans and easily transfer that into a shopping list? If you were writing a Sci-Fi epic that meant to encapsulate the political turmoil and growing global tensions of our current times, did your first draft tell a complete story that also encourages readers to ask the questions you think are most important? If you simply set out to retake your morning routine from the rushed mesh that it currently is, does your new plan give you back some of the focus you are craving?
Keep an open mind to what you learn in this testing process. You will likely learn immediate ways your solution can better solve your problem. Congratulations, your solution now has its own problems! Write those down and test again. You may find entirely new problems to solve and projects to start. Take note and keep testing. If something doesn’t work, don’t assume it’s a one-time glitch. Chances are, that glitch is a bug and will plague your solution until you figure out how to fix it. Describe that bug and keep testing some more.
You may find other surprising results from your tests. You may even learn that the problem you started with isn’t the real problem at all. Don’t be too surprised if this is the case, because it’s not uncommon. Your meal planning app may really need to be transformed into a budgeting app that helps prevent you from spending all your extra money on restaurants and drinks. Your Sci-Fi novel may turn into personal memoirs that better express your thoughts and opinions on the topics that matter most to you. Perhaps you found that it’s not your morning routine that needs work, it’s your nighttime routine. Don’t worry, your testing process is doing exactly what it’s meant to.
Rinse and Repeat
The power of this simple three step process is in its iteration. The iteration process may seem redundant on the surface—after all, aren’t you just repeating the same thing over again and expecting new results. [Insert obligatory quote about the definition of insanity here]. While you may start out thinking this process goes round in an endless circle, it’s closer to a spiral that gets tighter and tighter with each loop it makes. You are constantly refining the problem to be solved and the method of solving it with each round.
Your app starts as sketches on a piece of paper, evolves into working prototypes, and launches as a beautifully simple user experience on mobile devices everywhere. Your book starts as an idea, is clarified in an outline, and refined through multiple drafts to a publishable manuscript. Your morning routine starts as a fire-drill after snoozing five times and ends up as the most productive hour of your day, each and every day.
You do this by taking the lessons learned in your testing process and feeding that into your next stage of designing or planning. You better refine your problem statement, you clearly outline all the flaws in your current solution, you outline exactly how it did not solve the problem—and then you start the process over again. But this time, you have more information than when you first stepped foot onto this path of progress.
Real Problems, Real Solutions
Every day, real problems are solved using this method. Other methods have fancier names, additional steps, and beautiful graphics to go along with it, but the foundation that holds is all up looks exactly the same from company to company, industry to industry, and person to person. The only question remains, what problem are you going to solve now?
