How should we design? Start by fixing the Swiss Cheese

Over the course of my career, design problems have reached me in a few familiar shapes. An organisation has a new technology but does not know how to turn it into a product. Or they have a working product that is not gaining traction in the marketplace. Or they have a product and do not know where to take it next. Whatever the situation, everyone agrees that design needs to move forward, but the path can be unclear.

Another pattern I see at the start of these projects is inconsistency in what the organisation knows about the problem. In some areas they know a great deal, sometimes better than anyone else, yet there are also big gaps. I call this Swiss Cheese. The job is to find the holes and fill them.

This can be a minefield. The last thing most clients want to hear is that before we start, we need to do research or analysis. Some design teams simply dive in and treat the Swiss Cheese as a client-side problem, then blame poor outcomes on an imprecise brief. Product design cannot work like that. Performance is the measure of success, and if the upstream work is missing, success is unlikely. You cannot polish a poo, although if you are very careful you can roll it in glitter. I suspect you have encountered a few glitter poos in your time. Now you know where they came from.

If you are serious about creating effective products, a different course of action is required. Before kickoff, take stock of what is known and what is not, so you can target information gathering and begin a design programme with far more confidence that the outcomes will meet the company’s goals and objectives. Before diving in, it is worth thinking through four key entry points and how they can be integrated into the development process: user needs, the proposition and business case, contexts of use, and technology. These are more than places to collect requirements; they are opportunity areas that help teams push ideas further and innovate.

User Needs

Understanding users and their requirements can become a real time toilet, so work in this area needs to be treated like a radioactive isotope if it isn’t aligned with the organisation’s strategic intentions. Once it is aligned, however, there’s no end to the value a clear understanding of user needs can bring in uncovering unmet needs and potential market opportunities for new products and services.

Product teams often miss the nuance of what people actually want, especially if they already have a product or service idea in hand. Confirmation bias affects all of us, so understanding explicit, implicit, and latent needs clearly can save enormous amounts of wasted energy chasing costly development paths that were never truly desired in the first place.

Proposition and Business Case

When user needs are well understood, solutions tend to flow quickly from teams. Most people enjoy solving problems; it is one of the most rewarding parts of the process. The challenge is to test whether users actually agree with the proposition and are willing to pay for it, and whether the business is ready and well positioned to deliver it.

To do this, I often use frameworks such as Value Proposition Design and Business Model Canvas. These tools help clarify direction with external users and enable internal teams to explore how new ideas might affect their existing ways of delivering value.

Use Contexts

Understanding context of use means grounding design decisions in the realities of where, how, and by whom a product is experienced. It goes beyond identifying user needs to uncover the conditions, environments, and workflows that shape real-world interaction. To explore this, I look at who the wider community of users are, what tasks they perform, the tools or systems they rely on, and the physical, social, and organisational environments that influence them.

This understanding gives teams a shared picture of reality and a foundation for collaboration. It helps align design, engineering, and business perspectives while creating space to imagine new, integrated products that can adapt to the hidden constraints of the contexts they are used in.

Technology

Technology, in the broadest sense, is the application of knowledge to achieve a particular goal. Framed like this, every business is really just mediating between people and technologies to deliver value. Throughout my career I have helped companies capture value with different forms of technology: wearable sensors, radar systems, cognitive behavioural therapies, pharmaceuticals, and behaviour change techniques.

Capturing value from technology requires that it can be well adapted to the constraints of user needs, the business, and the context of use. So it’s important, when developing a new product, to select the right technologies for the problem being solved. It also helps when the technology can be broken down into a material form that can be shaped to fit the task at hand. Mapping its properties and constraints can empower multidisciplinary teams, giving them the confidence to work more effectively with the material being designed.