Design as a Signal: From Usability to Scalability

🏆 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬𝐧’𝐭 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭 — 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐚 𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬! As designers and stakeholders, we often fall in love with our ideas — whether it’s a visual decision like layouts, colors, or clever interactions, or a business decision that promises greater revenue. But none of these are about what we think looks or feels right. It’s about what actually works for the people using it. A beautiful interface can fail if it doesn’t solve the real problem. A great feature may not live up to expectations. That’s why validation is the most critical part of design. ⌛️Test early — even with rough prototypes. 👂Listen carefully to user feedback. 💫Iterate based on insights, not opinions. When you validate, you’re not just designing — you’re de-risking decisions, improving usability, and aligning the product with real user needs. Let’s keep designing with curiosity — and validating with users. ✨ What’s your favorite way to validate design decisions in a SaaS product?

🌍 Design isn’t just about creating—it’s about solving. And one of the most powerful approaches we have for problem-solving is Design Thinking: a human-centered, iterative process that pushes us to look deeper, think smarter, and build better solutions. ✨ The journey begins with Empathize. Before designing, we must first understand. It’s about stepping into the shoes of others, seeing the challenge from their perspective, and developing a deep emotional connection with the problem. 🎯 Then comes Define. Clarity is everything. A well-defined problem is half-solved. This stage is about cutting through the noise and articulating exactly what needs fixing. 💡 Next, we Ideate. Creativity takes the stage here—brainstorming without limits, generating bold and diverse ideas, and daring to imagine solutions that go beyond the obvious. ✈️ After ideas, we move to Prototype. Think of it as “learning by doing.” This isn’t about perfection—it’s about bringing ideas to life in a tangible way, so you can test, fail, adapt, and improve quickly. 🔄 Finally, we test. Real-world feedback fuels refinement. By testing prototypes in short cycles, we don’t just validate ideas—we evolve them, making solutions smarter, sharper, and more impactful with every iteration. 🌟 Design Thinking teaches us that innovation isn’t a straight line. It’s an ongoing cycle of empathy, creativity, and experimentation. Whether you’re designing a product, a service, or a strategy, this process reminds us to focus on people first, think deeply, and never stop improving. 👉 Because great design isn’t about making things look good—it’s about making life better. Credit to RésoPDG on Pinterest. ------ Design is everywhere, Great design starts here. Follow Design Daily for ideas that never take a day off.

How do we make design more accessible to the business internally and mitigate a lot of the friction in the process between brief and delivery? By harnessing a critical and hugely under appreciated soft skill in digital product design? Kindness. Here’s a bunch of words that will help designers understand this much needed soft skill: https://lnkd.in/e4zkdfri

💡 Design at scale: the quietest — yet most transformative — kind of work. Not every great design needs to be flashy. Often, real impact comes from the work happening behind the scenes: systems that run smoothly, experiences that stay consistent, and decisions made for millions of different users. This It's Nice That That article about Grammarly’s design approach brings an inspiring reflection on how designing at scale requires balance between consistency, adaptability, and empathy. At Novatics, we believe design is a strategic pillar, a driving force behind digital products that grow, evolve, and continue to make sense as they scale. If you’re also interested in how great product teams tackle these challenges, this read is worth your time. 🔗 Design at scale isn’t flashy – but it’s the most interesting work in the room: https://lnkd.in/dAj4W-Xd

Your redesign is probably going to fail. And here's why: 80% of redesigns focus on what looks outdated instead of what's actually broken. I've seen it happen dozens of times. A team  could spend 6 months redesigning their product. New colours. Modern fonts. Trendy animations. Launch day arrives. Users don't connect with it. Why? Because a fresh coat of paint doesn't fix a broken foundation. Here's what most redesign projects get wrong: ❌ Starting directly with aesthetics instead of user pain points ❌ Redesigning based on internal opinions, not user data ❌ Changing things that work to match current trends ❌ Ignoring the learning curve for existing users ❌ Focusing on what competitors are doing The hard truth about successful redesigns: → It’s not about making things look new → They're about making things work better → It’s don't chase trends → They solve real world problems → It’s not driven by boredom → They're driven and backed by data My framework for redesigns that actually work: 1. Start with the "Why" 2. Audit Before You Design 3. Don't Touch What Works 4. Test the Ugly Version First 5. Phase Your Rollout 6. Measure What Matters The uncomfortable reality? Sometimes the best redesign is no redesign at all. Sometimes it's fixing 3 critical pain points while leaving everything else untouched. Your users don't care if your interface follows 2025 design trends. They care if it helps them get their job done. Stop redesigning for designers. Start redesigning for users. Have you been burned by a redesign that looked great but performed poorly? #design

Design can speak for itself. And that’s its Achilles heel. When that approach is taken, however, its success gets buried under a pile of incremental improvements. Teams keep polishing and tweaking, yet the real value of design, why it works, and what impact it has quietly fades from view. It becomes a nice-to-have that everyone can agree on, yet no one can explain it. Humble designers don’t always chase credit, but when design can’t explain its own success, the organization loses its ability to understand why something works. That’s a problem. Ever launch a redesign that everyone loved but no one focused on why it worked? The numbers went up, but the story behind it got lost. That’s what happens when design “speaks for itself.” You can’t (and shouldn’t) explain everything, but you can show the mechanics of great design: how it connects to user needs, decisions, and outcomes. That’s where our obsession turned into something structured, a framework teams can actually use to make design’s value visible. That’s why we built Helio, and why we’re opening up our Glare framework to help teams make their work visible, show their contribution, and use design data to guide better decisions again and again. After 50,000 hours of work, we’ve defined four areas that Glare helps teams strengthen. It’s a simple sequence that shows how great design delivers results. Define: What does success look like? Teams need a shared way to describe what makes an experience good. Measure: How do we prove it? We need consistent ways to measure the value design creates across products, websites, and apps. Focus: How good is good? Benchmarking ideas across different dimensions helps reveal where design is truly adding value. Show: How does it all connect to business success? Mapping which areas are working and which aren’t makes design’s impact visible and measurable. →  We’re excited to share what we’ve learned and show product and design leaders how to bring this clarity to their own teams. We’re building a community of leaders who care about this shift in product design. Join us: https://lnkd.in/ggHXcVQZ P.S. We’re opening the next round of members this month. If you lead a team that’s ready to make faster, clearer design calls, shoot me a DM.

The definition of design keeps getting bigger. I started in small environments, sometimes acting as a creative department of one. That meant doing my job and parts of several others. It wasn’t always ideal, but it made me a rounded designer. I learned to think creatively, interact with clients, ask why before what, and focus on outcomes. For a while, that kind of breadth felt like the exception. Now it feels like the norm. With AI tools collapsing the distance from idea to functional product, everyone is doing everything. My brain doesn’t naturally click with code, but now there’s a tool for that. I can uncover a problem, generate a solution, and ship it faster than ever. At first it was frustrating. Too many hats, too much noise. But over time I built a few small tools for myself, and they worked. That was the aha moment: design really is becoming more democratic. If you thought it was accessible before, just wait. The definition of design keeps getting bigger. And I really think that’s a good thing. Image Caption:
 Design: bigger, faster, wider.

🚫 Myths vs Realities in My Product Design Journey When I first got interested in product design, I thought it was all about creating beautiful screens. You know — picking colors, choosing fonts, and making things look modern. But as I grew in the field, I realized there’s so much more beneath the surface. Here are a few myths I’ve personally had to unlearn 👇 Myth 1: Product design is just about visuals. Reality: The real magic happens in understanding users, defining problems, and finding the simplest, most human solutions. A good-looking design that doesn’t solve a problem isn’t good design. Myth 2: You need to know how to code to thrive. Reality: What matters more is communication — being able to explain your design decisions clearly and collaborate with developers. Myth 3: Designers work alone with their laptops and coffee. Reality: Collaboration is everything. Some of my best ideas came from user feedback, dev input, or a teammate’s honest critique. Myth 4: Once your design looks good, your job is done. Reality: The real work begins after testing. You learn what works, what doesn’t, and you iterate — again and again. Myth 5: Product design is easy. Reality: It’s rewarding, but it takes patience, curiosity, and a lot of learning. It’s part creativity, part strategy, and part empathy. The deeper I go, the more I realize — Product design isn’t just about what you create, it’s about how it helps people and the problems it solves. What’s one myth you had to debunk or find out there was more to it in your journey? Share here and let’s learn together #7DaysLinkedInPowerUpChallengeWithHaoma #20DaysLinkedInPowerUpChallengeWithHaoma #HaomaWorgwu #VisibilityAcademy

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 (𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗻𝗼 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁) 🎯 It's not that designers don't want to validate their work. It's that they don't have the luxury to. Designers KNOW they should validate. They WANT to run user tests. They WANT to measure impact. But then reality hits: "We need this shipped by Friday." "We don't have budget for user testing." "The CEO wants to see it live ASAP." So designers ship without certainty. They hope it works. This isn't a designer problem. It's a business problem. Stakeholders want velocity. Speed. Quick wins. What they DON'T want: "We need 2 weeks of research first." The result? Designers spend 80% designing and 20% validating. Backwards from what should happen. Here's what I realized: The products that actually solve user problems long-term? They're built on understanding + validation, not speed. But the entire industry is structured to reward shipping over solving. We celebrate "shipping fast." We don't celebrate "validating thoroughly." We measure: "Did we launch?" We should measure: "Did it actually work?" This is why I'm vocal about data-driven design: Because if validation becomes the EXPECTATION, not the exception, everything changes. If designers can say: "Here's the data proving this works" instead of "Trust me, it looks good", suddenly validation has VALUE. Suddenly it's business critical. So yes, designers WANT to validate their work. But first, we need to create an industry that LETS them. What's stopping validation in YOUR company? Budget? Timeline? Leadership buy-in? 👇 #ProductDesign #DesignCulture #DataDrivenDesign #UserValidation

Prototyping is where designs come alive… and where some of us lose our sanity 😅 You know that moment when everything looks perfect in Figma, until you hit 'Present' and realize few screens are not connected? Yeah, that one. But here’s the thing, prototyping isn’t just about fancy transitions. It’s about clarity, helping stakeholders understand, developers visualize, and users experience your idea before it’s built. Now, there are two types of designers when it comes to prototyping 👇🏽 1️⃣ The “Prototype-as-you-design” gang — testing flows in real-time, catching usability gaps early. (Say 'hi' to Teslimah🤭) 2️⃣ The “Prototype-after-design” crew — linking 57 screens in one sitting and questioning their life choices. Both have their wins. ✅ Prototyping-as-you-go helps you think in motion and refine user journeys faster. ✅ Prototyping after design ensures your flow feels polished and cohesive. No matter your style, remember that a prototype isn’t just for show; it’s how you bring your product to life before the first line of code is written. Designers, be honest, which team are you on? “Prototype-as-you-go” or “Prototype-at-the-end”?