The case for making your own design tools

"Building your own tools" in the modern era can take many forms. The video game industry has done a good job of this, creating specific game design platforms like Unreal Engine and Unity 3D, and then building studio-specific tools on top of these. Legendary animation studio Pixar got a leg up in the 80s and 90s by creating RenderMan, a proprietary rendering application that was eventually embraced throughout Hollywood. Even Airbnb has its own tools for creating charming animations and generating code from low-fi wireframes.

Even as a relatively small, young design studio, Topp has put effort into shaping our own tools as well. The most notable example is Noodl, a digital prototyping platform that we use for building and sharing IoT, app and connected device experiences, internally and with clients. It took several years to build, but the effort's been well worth it. The domains we work in are mostly brand new, which means any commercially available prototyping tools are already behind the curve.

Building our own tool lets us react to emerging technology in real time, and constantly improve the speed and fidelity of our prototypes. It also makes the tools themselves part of what we offer our clients: something we can shape to their needs, and use enable collaboration and feedback.

But even more important is this:

Using tools we've created helps us keep control of our own design culture, and hang on to the sense of exploration and self-determination that drew us to design in the first place.

It's also a unique opportunity to design for ourselves — a taste of our own medicine, so to speak, that makes us more empathetic to the plight of clients and collaborators.

We won't lie: building Noodl was a monumental task. But it wasn't impossible, it wasn't unpleasant, and we learned a tremendous amount along the way. Just as the tools for doing design work have gotten more powerful and easier to use, so have the tools for building the tools.

This DIY approach isn't just limited to gee-whiz technological tools either. There's also plenty of value to be found in building conceptual and strategic tools.

So while some of us in the studio work on updating Noodl, others are identifying and cataloging effective UX patterns, creating reusable libraries of illustrations and animations, and writing up effective strategies for communicating research insights. We've recently started codifying the key attributes of successful creative workshops, based on our experiences hosting hundreds of them. Each of these organized observations becomes a tool in its own right, smaller but far more personal and powerful than anything publicly available.

And it doesn't have to stop there. If you're fed up with the results of traditional brainstorming, invent your own idea generation technique. If you have user researchers on staff who consistently get great results, encourage them to outline their process, and write it down. Whatever you've gotten good at through trial and error can — and should — be turned into a tool.

Building your own tools isn't just a task for engineers; it's a philosophy for good design, for every designer.

Design is an exploratory discipline, but that doesn't mean we need to keep reinventing the wheel. If you've found something that's worked four times, chances are it'll also work the fifth, and that's worth solidifying. No matter what your experience level, building or customizing tools is a worthwhile pursuit.

Source: The case for making your own design tools