The Bottom-Up Approach to Design

User Experience November 09, 2008

There are two approaches to take when designing an interface: bottom-up and top-down.

In top-down, you first consider what the user needs are. Take a long and broad look at all the people in the world who could potentially use your product and figure out what features and components they would like as well as what workflow would best suit them. This I call "top-down" because you start with a large audience and narrow it down. This methodology can be alright if you have no idea what you want to do and you want to start by solving some existing problem.

The opposite approach (the one I subscribe to), however, is to start by first understanding what you're actually building. What your product *is* and what it *does* are two different things. When I talk about product design with various developers, I always ask them to first tell me what their product is. Their initial response is something to the effect of "well it does this and this and this." It's important to figure out what the core value of the product is before going forth. Understanding this will make it a lot easier thereafter making design decisions because they all must relate back to the essence.

Think of concentric circles. The core is the very essence of the product - what it is. The second ring is capabilities - what the product does. The third and final ring is context - how the product will be used.

In this visualization, you can imagine bottom-up as also being "outward" whereas top-down is "inward."

The difference between the two approaches is illustrated in the fact that when solutions are reached, there is a gap between them. The solution reached from the bottom-up approach is usually simpler because it started from something as simple as possible. Conversely, starting from the top-down will end up with something more complex because the starting point was much broader.

Yes, I know I'm not really giving too many specifics, but I want to make sure I don't reveal too much from what I'm privately writing. I just wanted to call attention to this idea. I suppose both methods have their good and bad points, but I think there are many more ways something can go wrong if you start on the top.

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