Getting out of the squiggly bit
My favourite model of the design process is that squiggly line that straightens out at the end.
I have used this in every single project in school, every freaking time you get frustrated, pessimistic, overwhelmed, confused — you’re in the squiggly bit! Things will start to make sense soon.
It’s also applicable in other areas such as every time a new course starts and you get a bit disappointed that the new teacher is different than the previous one — don’t worry, you’re in the squiggly bit! Soon you’ll understand the teacher’s methods and get to know them, just in time for a new teacher to come along and you’re back in the squiggly bit again.
The reason I’m posting this now is that I had a lovely moment with the PO at my organisation just last week. We had a speedrun project to validate in three days, somehow managed to get a hold of seven people to do a simple card sorting exercise with, and then we had loads and loads of Miro post-Its to sort. My PO was so clearly in the squiggly bit, just a little down over the lack of time and the general feeling that the interviews we did were so diverse. What about me? Was I in the squiggly bit? I guess I was but maybe the knowledge of being in the squiggly bit has finally sunk in to the point where I can ignore the inner monologue of “what’s going on? How will we ever get something out of THIS? There’s so much stuff! How will we know if we’re designing the right thing?” and rest comfortably knowing that the squiggly bit will straighten out eventually.
Maybe my PO doesn’t live within the squiggly bit as much as I do, maybe it was the time constraints of this project, maybe it was my overly ambitious risk mapping that I mainly put together to keep in mind that we might not have thought of everything — I don’t know. Whatever the reason, my PO was so clearly in the squiggly bit and struggling UNTIL the postIts were clustered and a product was starting to take shape. And that moment, where I could just SEE the squiggly line straightening out in my PO’s mind — that was beautiful.
A teacher of mine used to tell us to “be friends with uncertainty” and while that’s true, I’d rather be friends with the squiggly bit. The uncertainty is constant, you never ever actually know if you did come up with the best solution, just that you ended up with a solution. But what a beautiful thing it is to reside in the squiggly bit, just knowing that around the corner it stops squiggling and starts to make sense. The squiggly bit is like that annoying friend that posts constantly on Facebook until that one time they post something meaningful — and you don’t regret for a minute the time you’ve spent scrolling through the nonsense to get to that nugget of greatness.
