One of the ideas that I try to progress when I join a new project is that much of my job will simply be about exploring options. If I do my job right, more than half of the options will end up in the trash bin, so that’s to be expected. Many people have a hard time with this. Questions I receive from clients and coworkers: “Why would we work on an idea that likely won’t get implemented?” and “Why would you bring up a functionality that isn’t even close to something that’s on our story list?”

The reason is that in order to get to a great design, we need to start with options. Very rarely is the first idea the best, so we have to work through early ideas in order to get to better ideas.

This is a common, fundamental thought in the world of design. The car you drive is the result of thousands of hours of clay modeling. A given advertisement in a magazine has likely been created and recreated 100s of times (in pencil, ink, and finally by a series of printers). You think the final design of the iPod just fell out of somebody’s head? They sketched and modeled that thing for months before anything physical was created.

Martin Hardee, who works and blogs for Sun Microsystems, wrote a great piece about working through visual design options. He describes how their design team walked through a series of Comps (which I learned was an abbreviation for “Compositions,” but Martin says it means “Comparatives”) in order to get to a final design.

Compare those little Comp images with the way the page looks today. Pretty different, no? That’s called iteration. Not the same kind of iteration that they do in XP, but still a similar idea. Let’s not get into that though…differences in type of iteration are for another post. Either way, I think the design looks good, and there is evidence of some ideas progressing into the present day, while others were cut right from the start.

If you’re responsible for the visual design of a website, piece of software, or really anything, try your hand at creating a few options to choose from. Even if you just sketch ideas on paper, your design is sure to improve. Giving yourself options is a great way to get to a more successful visual design.