Falling In Love With the Problem, Not the Solution, Is More Important Than Ever

A lot of people who design and/or build software (and other artifacts) are unhappy right now. They're unsettled and overwhelmed, and many of them are wondering whether the work they spent years getting good at still matters.

There's grief in watching a craft you care about change so fast.

There's an old piece of product advice that I've taught designers and developers for years, and I think it's more important than ever before: fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

The purpose of the artifacts we create in researching and developing software has always been to solve the right problem. Code, wireframes, mockups, graphics all serve a purpose.

When you fall in love with a solution, anything that threatens it feels like it threatens you. I think that's contributing to the existential crisis many in the industry are feeling right now, whatever the title you carry.

Engineers

Code is a solution.

What problem were you trying to solve? A lot of the time, it was protecting people. You wrote code so someone's medical records stayed private, or so a small business owner got paid without anyone stealing from them along the way.

Are you in love with the typing, or what the typing accomplished? If AI helps you accomplish the goal more quickly, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

You still get to do a lot of the thinking, if you so choose. However, some problems have been solved many times, and AI can output that solution. So work at getting satisfaction from identifying and solving the problem itself.

UX Designers

A prototype is a solution.

What problem were you trying to solve? Often, it was helping someone learn. A person opening your app for the first time is a student. They're trying to build a mental model of how to accomplish a task in the software, and your design is how you teach them.

AI can generate interactive prototypes faster than we can sketch them. If we're more concerned with the problem than the solution, that becomes a freeing moment, not a stressful one.

You may need to step into the technical side of things more than before, because, with AI, code is the new design surface. Rather than push against it, consider how AI can help you interrogate and solve problems you couldn't before.

You are less limited by time than you were before. More and more, we are limited only by our imaginations and willingness to experiment.

What problems can you explore now that you couldn't before, for both your users and your own processes?

Visual Designers

A graphic is a solution.

What problem were you trying to solve? Often, it was touching someone's heart. You chose a color, a typeface, and the space around an image so that a person would feel something, whether that was trust, or calm, or joy.

AI can help you generate that image without you having to drag around a single pixel. But dragging pixels was always the means to a solution, not the problem to solve.

If you focus on the problem, the feeling you want an image to engender, then AI is just a new brush on an infinite canvas.

The Problems Are Still Here

I won't pretend this change is painless. Some of the work we loved is changing for good, and a lot of the pressure people feel comes from organizations chasing hype instead of solving anything. It's completely reasonable to be frustrated by that.

But the problems haven't gone anywhere. People still need to learn, their data still needs protecting, and they enjoy being moved by what they see. If anything, those problems need people who care about them more now, because the world is filling up with unexamined, thoughtless output.

The professionals who come through this well will be the ones who remember what they were solving in the first place.

So what problem were you trying to solve? Fall in love with it again.