Lombardi Trophy of Design

The NFL playoffs start this weekend and I’m very excited. My Atlanta Falcons are the #1 seed in the NFC and I just got NFL Network this week so I’m excited about the awesome coverage they do. Today let’s take a look at how we can take the basic playoffs structure and apply it to design. We’ll ignore two aspects of the NFL playoffs for the purposes of this exercise: 1) The AFC-NFC split and 2) The top two seeds in each conference get a BYE.

How it works…

1. Top designs get in. We started off with 32 and paired that down to the top 12. Now, you aren’t usually going to create 32 different designs but the idea is that you have a sizable selection to pick from. Apple does this with their designs. They make sure they have 10 designs to pick from. Not 10 derivatives of the same solution but 10 different solutions.

2. Paired for Elimination. As you start to pair up the designs you will see that some are stronger than others and those are the ones that will continue on.

3. Iterative Elimination. As you continue to pair up the designs you’ll see the strengths and weaknesses until you reach the eventual winner that you feel is the strongest.

4. Learning from Winning. Teams don’t continue on in the playoffs and play exactly the same way each game. Your designs should also show their weaknesses and probably take on traits of some of the losing designs to make it the ultimate design.

5. Take Time Off. There’s a week between each round of the playoffs so teams can rest, learn from their mistakes, and prepare for the next round. Taking a break between each round of design reviews can give you time to think about them and come back to the table with a stronger sense of what should continue on. It will also prevent any burnout from a long review session that could lead to a weaker design coming out on top simply due to rushing resulting from reviewer fatigue.

This is by no means the only way to do a design review but it’s one I believe could work. Try it out some time and let me know if it helped you in thinking about the design review process.