Designing in the Face of Uncertainty: A Guide to Managing Ambiguity
Ambiguity can leave teams in analysis paralysis. Designers can help.
Written for Instacart’s Design Blog in 2021
From broad product briefs to emerging technologies, the design process is filled with ambiguity. However, some teams are less comfortable with ambiguity and may need help identifying a clear path forward when faced with broad, undefined projects. Designers are in a unique position to help—we’re naturally curious and observant, and we’re trained to draw connections that others may miss. By leaning into our natural strengths, we can create clarity with the team. And by leveraging existing experiences, creating space for ideas, and leaning into our storytelling abilities, designers can help refine ambiguity with their teams into intuitive experiences.
Leverage what’s in front of you
When you’re handed an open-ended project, where do you begin? No project exists in a vacuum—you can always leverage existing experiences, data, and research.
I often approach ambiguous design problems by mapping the existing customer experience and ecosystem. Not only does this identify how the project relates to the current landscape, it can also help the team see potential gaps and opportunities.
Take Instacart’s expansion into alcohol, beauty, and baby products. Moving into new markets beyond groceries—our core business—we were faced with lots of complexity. How will people know they can get makeup on Instacart? How might customer behaviors change?
Our design team went back to the core grocery flow to look for elements we could extend into the next experience and elements that needed to change. By mapping out exactly how Instacart’s experience was designed with grocery shoppers in mind, we identified strategic opportunities to improve these new shopping experiences.
With one simple step, our expansion started to feel more defined—and therefore achievable.
Create space to drive clarity
Ambiguity becomes a challenge when people have conflicting directions, ideas, and goals. There were a lot of different—and sometimes competing—ideas for Instacart’s initial foray into different markets. How can we get everyone on the same page?
To move forward, it’s important to get everyone aligned with the core customer needs.
For Instacart’s foray, I pulled everyone together in Figma to brainstorm across open-ended opportunity statements. For example: Someone wants to order beer for a party or restock their bar; how would they do so through Instacart’s current experience? Or: How might we help customers learn about the broad range of products?
With these, I (and everyone else) could really lean into the ambiguity, crafting questions that didn’t have clear, immediate answers for the team to brainstorm against. These statements create space to embrace uncertainty, while also giving the team just enough direction—and an exciting starting point. Clear themes and focus areas start to emerge, which you can form into a cohesive visualization of shared opportunities. This exercise helps push the boundaries of what is possible, and is also a great way to help everyone feel a part of the product’s creative development.
Visualize a point of view
Creating space for people to pose questions and explore new possibilities makes ambiguity feel less daunting, but all of this exploration needs to be synthesized into a coherent point of view that the team can adopt to approach the problem.
Now it’s time to make use of your natural storytelling abilities and synthesize the questions and ideas that came out of the exercises—alongside customer research—into a compelling narrative for the team to rally around.
When I spoke with customers about emerging markets, two use cases stood out:
Instacart could help expecting parents navigate the difficulties of shopping for a newborn.
Instacart could help customers pair the right wine with snacks for a party.
To make the narrative come alive, I developed prototypes to address these use cases, taking the ideas from our brainstorm and shaping them into experiences that helped these customers meet their needs. Prototypes are powerful—not only do they help you iron out the details, but nothing beats ambiguity like a working product in hand. This is also a great way to drive conversations with your team or product partners to align on open questions or scope.
A little effort in making the story visually exciting goes a long way in creating empathy among the team and helping them envision a shared, new direction for the product.
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
By now the process should feel more familiar. Even if some things still feel ambiguous, you can begin implementing your vision. Alongside Instacart’s Product and Engineering Managers, I ran a document summarizing our brainstorm through a RICE framework to develop priorities and build out a backlog for the team.
We were more confident in some items than others, so we slated the ones we were unsure on for concept testing and additional user research.
Ambiguity might not be totally resolved by now, but that’s okay. Once your team is aligned on a strategic vision, you can start building, shipping, testing, and refining.
Embrace ambiguity
When there’s too much ambiguity teams can get caught by analysis paralysis instead of moving forward. But ambiguity doesn’t have to be feared—leaning in and embracing it helps us arrive at unexpected solutions and pushes our projects to new heights. When problems are too ambiguous, don’t worry—just trust the process.