Designing Experiences: The Hidden Process Behind Effective Software 

Guest blog post by experience design expert Ehab Bandar 

Most software is bloated and hard to use, even as more and more money and talent are poured into building best-in-class software. Despite countless efforts to streamline and improve software development — from agile to scrum to frameworks of all shapes and sizes — creating compelling user experiences remains elusive. This article attempts to unpack the process great teams take to create software people love. 

Every tool or capability that’s around today started with a specific need — a gap to be filled. That alarm clock on your desk, email client, chatbot, and that oddly shaped spork was born out of an itch that needed scratching. But creating a tool is only half the battle; to succeed, it has to connect with the people who need it. Enter experience design, the process of making those connections and evolving products to feel intuitive and cohesive through constant trial and error. 

It goes by many names: UX design, user-centered design, service design, product design, human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design (IxD), usability engineering, etc. In essence, it’s the science of applying creativity and user research to solving a human program. Think of it like an experiment or investigation with different disciplines converging together: A user interacts with a product, and the designer adjusts based on feedback. This is far from a linear process but rather a feedback loop — users try, designers tweak, and the cycle repeats. Through countless iterations, these adjustments shape an experience that feels right, intuitive, and purposeful. 

For many teams, this process feels daunting, even aimless, with things stalling, falling through the cracks or derailed by a myriad of considerations. While for others, they put trust in the process to deliver the right outcomes. 

Creativity is a team sport, or, as Amy Edmondson says in her book Teaming, collaboration “is the art of communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of all kinds.” It’s this cross-functional interplay, guided by a vision for what problem to solve, that enables the best ideas to bubble up regardless of hierarchy. 

Without this continuous refinement — shorthand for tinkering — you end up with software that doesn’t quite satisfy the original need; they’re just things on a screen with no unifying theme. But when the approach is followed with care and craft — what Paul Graham calls “founder mode” — a pattern emerges; what works sticks, and what doesn’t gets tossed aside. It’s a little like natural selection for design: The fittest interactions survive, forming a language users find familiar, engaging, and the intangible platitude of “it just works.”  

This evolution happens under often immense and contradictory pressures: external feedback from users, market demands, technical constraints, and internal drives to perfect the product.  

The pressure forms a “double diamond” effect, the design thinking methodology composed of two distinct but interconnected phases: exploration of possibilities and refining solutions. While the process is often packaged as a neat and tidy approach to user-centered design, the reality is a lot messier, with random factors and serendipity playing a big role in the final product. Yet, that fuzzy middle is critical in separating well-designed tools from their cheaper, less effective counterparts. 

In essence, experience design is about more than just a capability or satisfying a user requirement. It’s about creating a repeatable journey, starting from a basic user need, uncovered by understanding the customer and designed to create an impactful solution, forged in the fires of continuous improvement and collaboration. Without this process, tools remain just that — tools. But with the right team and approach, new tools become experiences that shine brightly with their users, not unlike that other singular diamond, formed under immense pressure and over time. 

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