hebel. today · 2 November 202611 / 69
Arts · Design Thinking
Stop solving the wrong problem before you build
Most organizations struggle because they define problems through the lens of their own tools rather than human motives. When you focus on the "what"—such as a feature request or a new software tool—you often…
From 10 newsletters · 2 min read · one thing to try
Most organizations struggle because they define problems through the lens of their own tools rather than human motives (Jakob Nielsen on UX, Big Think Business). When you focus on the "what"—such as a feature request or a new software tool—you often miss the underlying "why" that drives user decisions. Research by Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows that the most successful creators are those who engage in "problem-finding," spending significant time exploring the composition before they ever start building. You can diagnose these motives by asking "why" three times, moving from the requested action to the actual goal, such as proving compliance or building trust (Jakob Nielsen on UX). This shift prevents you from optimizing a single node in a system while accidentally breaking the broader activity it supports.
“solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.”
ShadowBox Decision Games: Warfighters
Effective problem-solving requires framing a messy situation into a concrete, actionable challenge (ShadowBox Decision Games). Instead of relying on intuition, adopt the experimental mindset of early engineers like John Smeaton, who isolated variables and used scale models to build empirical rules for design (The Digital Engineer, The Digital Engineer). You can formalize this by turning your curiosity into a small, reversible bet: define a hypothesis, identify the smallest version you can test, and set a win condition before you begin (The Designer's Field Guide, by Kai Wong., The Designer's Field Guide, by Kai Wong.). This approach protects your judgment, as you are no longer defending an opinion but testing a wager against a defined outcome. When you name the win condition up front, the result speaks for itself, preventing the common trap of treating every project as a referendum on your professional worth.
Leadership at any scale involves clearing obstacles and providing the context that allows others to act effectively (Lead with Kelly McGinnis Lessons from…). When you are in a hurry, you may hand off tasks as riddles, assuming your team shares your internal context, which leads to rework and frustration. To avoid this, focus on the business metrics that your design is intended to move, rather than the dopamine hit of shipping a finished feature (AI Artifact, AI Artifact). By mapping how screens, data, and agents connect, you can identify where communication structures might cause the product to fail at the system level (AI for UX Substack). Treat your design work as a way to understand the people who use it, ensuring that you are designing the conditions that make better decisions possible, rather than just creating more complex interfaces (Shekhar’s Approaches for Innovation and…).
Try today · 20 min
Run a 'Zombie UI' check on your next design mockup.
Walk through your flow as a user from the entry point to the moment that moves your core business metric, noting where the design helps or hurts that outcome.
You need
- A current design mockup
- Defined business metric (e.g., conversion rate, time to first action)
- User persona description
Steps
- Identify the specific business metric the design must move.
- List the user's goal at every screen in the journey.
- Identify potential obstacles that could stop the user.
- Check if each screen directly supports the business metric.
- List any UI elements that look finished but break the user journey.
- Keep the design in draft until the list of broken elements is empty.