The Poirot Method: How Designers Can Investigate Ambiguous Problems
The job market really values designers who know how to work with ambiguous problems.
Job descriptions usually describe this skill with nice phrases like comfortable with ambiguity, able to navigate uncertainty, or strong problem-framing skills.
But if we translate that into normal human language, it sounds more like this:
“We need a designer who can be given something unclear, preferably due yesterday, and somehow figure it out.”
I wasn’t always that kind of designer.
In 2020, I joined YCLIENTS, an online booking service used by beauty salons and other service businesses. By that point, the product had existed for years and had mostly been built by engineers, while the product and design functions were still taking shape.
To me, the whole thing looked like one enormous knot of ambiguity: a complex B2B product, dozens of connected user flows, an unfamiliar domain, processes I didn’t understand, and tasks...
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