Thread by @MorelloNMST

Following up from yesterday’s goal post, let’s discuss the next step - forming a solution.

Problem solving is the root of design craft. While our goals guide us, how we achieve those goals often determines success or failure.

This has a few steps you’ll want to cover;

* Brainstorm possibilities
* Narrow options
* Select one

How you do this is not rigid, but that you do it is critical.

Brainstorming is where you can go sort of big. Your job is to generate as many ideas for the approach as you can.

Be imaginative! This is a great place to be a bit wilder, or more outside-the box thinking. The earlier in a process, the less risk-adverse you should be.

This is also best done with others, if possible. This can be asynchronous too - collating ideas from individual efforts into a pile.

But more perspectives and approaches are better. Especially because it helps us manage biases from our own influences.

Write all these down. If you have duplicate answers, recording that is good too. You’ll want to have this as a way to reference the ideas later.

Avoid the temptation to dismiss much at this stage, unless it’s really not on topic (trying to solve other problems etc).

Also avoid the temptation to have one idea and stop there because it seems good. Part of this process is to get you past your first and obvious answer.

It might be good, but if it is it can survive the gauntlet of others, push past your instincts.

With this list of approaches, we want to narrow it down. I like to see this as a bit like sculpting; you have too much rock, and if you remove enough in the right spots, you’ll have a statue.

Narrowing down means we need to evaluate our options;

Here are some discussion points and criteria for evaluating your approach;

* What are the risks and downsides of this approach?
* How well does this solve the issue?
* What trade offs and opportunity costs does this bring?
* How feasible is it?

Write these down too.

This is an attempt to define why an approach is worth pursuing or not.

Tactical conversations like this can lead to bigger questions; like do we value balance or play style expression more? Do we value the player exploring freely or having clarity on where to go? Etc.

Discussing these is a process where some of the best collaborative effort can be used as well as the most dysfunctional train wrecks can be seen,

Hard skills analyze, but being generously-minded and intellectually honesty are critical to this not being a pissing contest.

Once we’ve done this, some will feel like they’re obviously off the table. These can be safely eliminated. It’s best to leave borderline options in the table until it’s time to commit to an approach - which we haven.’t done yet.

Let’s move on to selecting an option.

With the list narrowed, we still can only pick a single approach - or rather should! Throwing spaghetti at the wall often leads to chaotic results and weak learning. Our design should be intentional and targeted.

Again, we discuss. But we don’t decide by consensus.

In each case, there should be a decision maker. This might be the owning designer, a lead, even a producer depending on the situation.

This person’s job is to understand and take the previous info into account and make sure we can move forward.

This brings us to sense-making.

There’s a reason strong communication skills are so valuable in design; it’s not just good that we think and choose, we also need to rationalize our decisions to ourselves, other designers, our team and even players.

If you can’t explain it, it probably doesn’t make sense,

The trade offs and downsides of earlier will be somewhere in the option you chose. Nothing in design is free of cost or risk, and those will come up as you share it.

It’s important to include known risks and why when communicating, not just the upsides.

I’ll go into design comms in another thread, but the short version is your job is to build confidence that;

You’ve all thought through this
You know what you’re getting into
It’s a good solution considering what we know

Avoid taste and preference like the plague here.

It’s hard to like design without an enjoyment of problem solving. It’s the core of the job, and why design is knowledge work.

It also should show that design is, in fact, a team sport in most cases. We do want vision, but not a myopic one.

Structuring your approach is a great way to elevate your intellectual design skills. Tomorrow, we’ll go into the design loop a bit more (since I forgot to define that in an earlier post!) and potentially discuss the next step; execution.