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
Designers are uniquely positioned to help our teams break out of ambiguity and tackle new, emergent areas. We are trained to be curious, observant, and systems-minded. While others may feel stuck, we explore patterns, ask questions, and shape a path forward. By leaning into our strengths in craft, storytelling, and synthesis, we help turn ambiguity into clarity and guide teams toward elegant, intuitive outcomes.
Leverage what’s in front of you
It can be daunting to know where to begin when you are handed an open-ended project with little constraints or clarity. No project exists in a vacuum, you can always leverage existing experiences, data, and research and drive the clarity you need.
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 help the team see potential gaps and opportunities. It grounds you in reality while making the problems very clear.
Take Instacart’s expansion into alcohol, beauty, and baby products. We wanted to move beyond our core business of groceries to support a variety of retailers. How will people know they can get makeup or dog food on Instacart? How might we help them get diapers quickly? How might customer behaviors change?
Our design team went back to the core grocery flow to look for elements we could extend to meet these new needs. Would our approach for a user shopping for weekly grocers map to someone shopping for monthly beauty products? If not, why? New moms need items quickly, how might our experience evolve to serve use cases beyond 2hr delivery? Understanding the needs of the new use cases while lookin at what we could leverage from our existing experiences helped us identify strategic opportunities to improve these new shopping experiences at new retailers.
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 might we get everyone on the same page?
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, brands, and stores Instacart has to offer? How might we help an Instacart shopper shop their weekly groceries while caring for their newborn baby?
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. Clear themes and focus areas start ton quickly emerge, which you can then 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 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… and 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 or dinner 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 fleshed out prototoypes that showed how Instacart could help 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.