What a profound thought Jan Zheng.

There could be multiple perspectives on it and I kinda wish the designer’s work and the business goals were orthogonal but they aren’t.

All of us have got our own way of approaching design problems but given our company builds B2B SaaS apps, we typically end up thinking and asking the following questions before getting on with the design -

1. Whom are we designing this for?
2. What are their pain points?
3. What solutions have they tried and why didn’t they work?
4. What should be the overall scope of the design solution?
5. Are there any constraints that we should be cognizant about?

These are some of the questions we ask and the reason why I’m sharing this is to make a point that our design is in a context. If our solution doesn’t fit in the context then it would be a bad design and by the virtue of it, we would be bad designers :(

And there have been times, when we have failed. If I was to look back on the . times we failed, I would say that we failed to get married to the users’ problems i.e. didn’t understand the context of the problem well enough.

Thus, I would say that context, business goals and constraints are critical to creating good designs.