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- Create an objective
- Before creating or testing designs, make sure to have SMART goals to help form criteria. See also Trello Boards.
2. Create Designs
- Depending on the project or the amount of progress, these designs can manifest in different ways, but making more than one design is often beneficial
- People often create one design and then take time to fix problems and make slight improvements. Instead, try creating multiple designs that have slight differences. This allows you to test individual elements rather than a design as a whole and keeps you from being overly invested in one design.
- To save time, instead of creating multiple full fledged designs create a piece that can be removed or replaced. For example, if the base of your design was attached by something non-permanent (like bolts), you could switch base shapes or materials and test which is most effective. This helps develop the design without requiring creating an entirely new model.
- People often create one design and then take time to fix problems and make slight improvements. Instead, try creating multiple designs that have slight differences. This allows you to test individual elements rather than a design as a whole and keeps you from being overly invested in one design.
3. Test Designs
- Ideally if you have multiple designs, tools like Pugh Matrices can be effective in deciding the design that best fits your needs.
- No matter if you are testing one or multiple designs creating criteria as well as an expectation of the results of that criteria is important.
- By creating set expectations, you can compare if the design is able to succeed, meet, or fail in that criteria. Without expectations, an individual may be more likely to consider something more of a success than it really is.
- When testing, multiple tests per criteria will grant more accurate and more comparable data.
4. Consider the Successes and Failures
- After testing designs, it is important to consider the mechanism behind why something succeeded or failed.
- By identifying the reason something failed, you can address the problem directly. This can often be difficult but identifying problems allows you to innovate and create more successful designs
- Additionally, identifying the reason something succeeded allows you to replicate that element in future designs.
5. Improve, Create New Designs, and Test Again
- Based on the information gathered, you can identify the most successful designs, but also be aware of its successes and failures. You can then improve the most successful design or create a new design that reduces ineffective elements but contains the successful ones.
- After you create this new design or designs, consider your criteria again. You may want to add more criteria, make the criteria more difficult (or easier depending on original success), or remove any criteria that now longer needs to be tested.
- With the new criteria, you can test again and continue innovation.
6. Finalize
- Of course, you could test over and over again. Due to time constraints and expectations, at some point you will need to have a finished design. Your design will never be perfect and could always be improved, so be aware when it's time to finish testing.
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