What's your problem?

I have spent a lot of time learning to slow down at the beginning. Not to hesitate, but to look harder at the problem before reaching for solutions. The more time you spend understanding what is actually broken, the better your answer tends to be.

When people outside the field think about design, they usually think about how things look. And that is not entirely wrong — visual craft matters. But it is a small part of what design actually does.

The word itself is older than the profession. In the 16th century it meant to plan or outline a scheme. By the early 1700s it had evolved to mean "to contrive for a purpose." That is still the most useful definition. Design is intentional. It exists to solve something.

This becomes obvious when you move outside digital products. An architect designing a staircase is solving a problem — how do you move between floors safely and efficiently? An engineer designing a bridge is solving a problem. The aesthetics follow from the solution. Good design, in almost any field, is what happens when you have understood the problem well enough that the answer becomes clear.

The first question worth asking is whether the problem is real. Not every brief represents a genuine need. Sometimes a product is commissioned because a competitor launched something similar, or because someone in a meeting had an idea they liked. Neither is a good enough reason to build something.

Microsoft's Band is a useful example. Launched in 2014, it was a wearable health tracker with solid functionality — but it didn't do anything meaningfully different from cheaper alternatives, and it didn't look as good as the Apple Watch that arrived shortly after. It had no clear answer to the question: why would someone choose this? By 2016 it was gone.

Before designing anything, it is worth asking: what problem does this solve, and for whom? Is that problem real and significant enough that someone would change their behaviour to address it? If you cannot answer those questions clearly, the project probably needs more thinking before it needs more designing.

It is also worth remembering that digital is not always the answer. A grocery list on paper is faster and more reliable than most grocery list apps. Sometimes the existing solution is fine.

Even when a problem is real, it is easy to solve the wrong version of it.

A few years ago I worked with a fashion retailer that had installed interactive screens in their stores. Engagement was very low. The brief we received was to improve the interface — the assumption being that the screens were confusing or unattractive. Before doing anything, we went into the stores to watch how customers actually moved through the space. What we found was that most people did not notice the screens at all. There were so many competing visual triggers — posters, displays, products — that the screens were effectively invisible. The problem was not the interface. It was that nobody knew the screens were there.

If we had taken the brief at face value, we would have redesigned something that was not broken, and changed nothing.

The technique I find most useful here is asking why — repeatedly. When you are given a problem, ask why it is a problem. Then ask why again. Keep going until you reach something that feels like the real issue. It is a simple method, but it is hard to shortcut. Each answer reveals an assumption worth questioning.

Good thinking and good solutions still fail when execution is poor. I have seen well-researched, well-considered work fall apart because nobody had thought clearly about the environment it would live in — the technical constraints, the operational realities, the other things competing for the same attention.

The three things that need to work together are the problem, the solution, and the execution. Each one matters as much as the other. A good solution to the wrong problem is a failure. A good solution to the right problem, badly executed, is also a failure.

This does not mean sacrificing creativity for practicality. If you have spent enough time on the problem, the solution that emerges tends to be both functional and considered. The creativity does not disappear — it just has something real to work with.