Obvious in hindsight

One of the challenges I face in my work is that things often feel obvious in hindsight. Pair this with the fact that a ‘simple’ outcome is often the result of a complicated process and a lot of work, and you begin to glimpse the paradox at the heart of design: the better the solution, the more invisible the effort that went into it becomes.

When I work on app, website or system designs, I’ll often start with untangling. I’ll take the ideas, sketches or existing structures and designs a client has and I’ll look for the patterns, processes and – perhaps most importantly – the assumptions that they encode. From there we are more free to look at whether those underlying patterns, processes and assumptions are still valid and useful, and whether we’ve missed anything crucial in the mix. With that clarity, I can then restructure the project – sometimes in quite significant ways.

This often leads to an ‘a ha!’ moment for the client, and often lets us profoundly simplify the project. However, shortly after this a shift occurs. This new, simplified approach is so successful that it feels obvious. More than that though, it feels like the way things have always been. The challenge for me as a professional working in this space is to show the value of that shift, even when the shift feels like it never happened.

I recently worked with a client who was struggling with an app concept. Their system felt vast, with menus nested within menus, and they were finding it a challenge to manage and extend any further. What’s more, it led to hard, frustrating conversations with their development team who, understandably, flagged issue after issue with it. After some time spent pulling apart the pieces, we suddenly saw that over half of what they were doing wasn’t necessary at all anymore, and that within the system, we were duplicating effort and processes in quite a number of places. From there, the pared-back system looked disarmingly simple even though it achieved the same result. They were delighted, but within a week the simplicity felt so natural that they could barely remember the complexity we had started with — the very reason I’d been brought into the project in the first place.

This challenge isn’t unique to my practice. Take the modern phone. It’s obvious why it’s the way it is. It is (at the time of writing) a thin, flat rectangle of glass and metal. It’s a touchscreen. Tracking back to pre-2007, and the introduction of the iPhone, this wasn’t the case. At the time, a phone with no physical buttons seemed, to many, absurd. Yet once the idea landed, it rewrote the rules so completely that it now feels inevitable. We don’t marvel at the touchscreen each morning; we simply use it, forgetting the leap it represented.

That’s the strange fate of good design: it disappears. It stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only way things could ever have been. My work lives in that space – helping clients move from the complicated and tangled to the effortless and obvious. And even if the effort vanishes in the rear-view mirror, the impact is lasting. The hidden value of design lies in this paradox: the more work it takes to create, the more it dissolves into the everyday, leaving behind only clarity, freedom, and a sense of rightness that lets people move forward with confidence.