Innovation vs iteration is one of those definitions that most digital product designers don't tend to think about; at least not until after they've been bitten on the arse after failing to recognise it. The question of whether your role, team or project is “innovative” or “iterative” in nature is an important one and something every designer and design leader should be conscious of.
Why does it matter?
As an individual contributor, it can inadvertently drive you down a needlessly difficult career path. As a design leader, it can result in poor hiring decisions and an imbalance in your team's overall capabilities. If you try to apply iterative design techniques to an innovative design project, you're going to hit some major obstacles, and the same is true the other way around.
I had never thought about this until very recently, and thought it was an interesting distinction worth sharing. It's one of those things that, once you think about it, seems ridiculously obvious, but until that point rarely enters your mind. Or maybe I just don't make enough time to think about this stuff holistically.
Innovative design (creating something entirely new, that nobody has ever seen or done before) demands an entirely different skill-set to iterative design (tweaking an existing product to eke out the tiniest incremental improvement), yet very few designer job descriptions draw a distinction between the two. If anything, most design job descriptions mash the two together, as though they were part of the same discipline. But they're not.
In my early career, the web was relatively young, and had not yet been homogenised to the degree it is now. The common design patterns we find in disciplines like e-commerce, for example, had not yet been established, so every design project was effectively an exercise in discovery and innovation.
We designed every user-journey from scratch, inventing new ways of taking a customer through the purchase process, speculating on what might work, and then watching the conversion rate carefully to see if our assumptions were right. This was innovative design at its most raw.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and the online shopping experience is now well and truly baked into the public consciousness. Shopping baskets and checkouts all work in exactly the same way, because the numbers have undeniably proven over the last twenty years what works and what doesn't. It wouldn't make sense for an e-commerce designer to innovate these days, any more than it would make sense for a car designer to reinvent a new shape of wheel.
Instead, e-commerce designers observe funnels and speculate as to what minor tweak they might make to minimise drop-off at each stage. They come up with hypotheses, and design tests to prove or disprove them. They run A/B tests to determine which is most effective, and run statistical analysis to decide if their results are meaningful or not. This kind of design is iterative, not innovative.
Again, why does that matter?
Well, these two approaches to design require completely different skills and mindsets. If you've spent your formative years in an e-commerce environment adjusting button colours and tweaking micro-interactions, you're going to find designing an entirely new concept from scratch quite overwhelming.
Likewise, if (like me) you've come from an agency background, where every client wants to stand out from the crowd, and uniqueness is the unequivocal currency of design talent, then the ultra-disciplined, metrics-driven approach to iterative design is going to be equally alien. As a design leader, it's important to recognise this distinction, not only in your team members, but in your projects too. Bashing a square peg into a round hole will get you nowhere.
At Nutshell, we're designing an entirely new concept that has never existed before; a no-code drag n' drop application development platform with an entirely visual story-based build paradigm. There are no established design patterns to emulate in this space, which means we're always taking educated risks based on our discovery work and early prototyping.
Yet a large part of our work is also centred around delivering internal business software for our customers, created using that platform. This is far more conventional in nature, is entirely process- and task-driven, and is therefore far more measurable. So even within a relatively tiny company, we have a portfolio of products and projects that sit at various points along the spectrum, from creative innovation to procedural iteration.
Can a designer be both?
Most designers I've worked with have specialised in, or have a natural leaning toward one or the other. Most of my career has been on the innovative side. This is as much due to my age as it was to do with my agency background; the whole online world was only really just beginning when I started out as a designer. I only made the transition to the iterative side as the technology evolved, my roles became more senior and therefore my work became more results-oriented.
This transition has involved learning new skills, particularly around quantitative research and statistical analysis, and developing an entirely new outcome-oriented mindset. So how might understanding this distinction between innovation and iteration help other designers?
Well, for individual contributors, it can help you identify your blindspots. It can help you see which side of the spectrum you're currently on, based on the type of work you're doing right now, and figure out which skills you might need to work on, to take the next steps in your professional development and become a more rounded product designer.
For design leaders, being honest with yourself about how much of your work is innovative, and how much of it is iterative shines a light on the gaps in your current team structure. It enables you to define a recruitment strategy or an internal training and mentoring initiative to re-balance your team capabilities, and help your designers do more of what makes them happy.
Certainly worth a few moments of reflection.
