Ask Better Questions
Renowned American architect and engineer George Keller once said, “To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.” But as creatives, we sometimes trade creativity for speed only to meet deadlines with work that we aren’t proud to put into our portfolios.
In an old blog post, co-founder of Basecamp (and co-author of Rework) Jason Fried, compiled a list of every question he asked when looking at a design-in-progress. Some of the examples:
What does it say?
What does it mean?
Is what it says and what it means the same thing?
Do we want that?
Why do we need to say that here?
Where’s the idea?
What problem is that solving?
How does this change someone’s mind?
What makes this a must have?
Most of the time “is it done?” isn’t a good enough question. If you plan ahead and build opportunities for structured feedback into your design process, you’ll be able to ask some of the aforementioned questions that will dramatically improve the quality of your work. It’s simple – if you ask better questions, you’ll get better answers.
Beyond the context of a design-in-progress, learn how to ask better questions from this Harvard Business Review primer here.
