The Anatomy of a Design Decision

What are the habits of highly effective design teams? In this Webstock 2012 talk, Jared Spool, founder of UIE, argues that the best designs come not from one decision but from hundreds of well-made ones, while the worst come from hundreds of poorly made ones. The quality of your decisions is what stands between you and a great design.

For five years, Spool and his team studied how designers make decisions. When do they use outside information, such as research about their users? When do they go with their gut? When do they look back at past decisions and lessons learned?

Spool presents the findings as five styles of decision making (self design, unintentional design, genius design, activity-focused design and experience-focused design) and explains which of them produces quality results. The talk is an entertaining look at the instincts of the best designers and what separates them from the worst.