The Art of Noticing: What Happens When Designers Slow Down and Look

On photography, curiosity, and seeing what others miss.

I’ve been spending more time with photography lately. And I’ve noticed something interesting.

When I have my camera with me, I pay attention differently.

I notice the way the light is hitting a flower. A bird I would normally walk past. A reflection on the water. A small detail in the background that somehow makes the whole image more interesting. None of those things suddenly appeared because I picked up my camera.

I just slowed down enough to notice them.

And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized how connected that is to the way I think about product design.

We spend a lot of time looking

As product teams, we look at a lot of things.

Research. Data. Dashboards. Customer feedback. Roadmaps. Backlogs. Support tickets.

Now AI can help us look at even more—summarizing thousands of comments, identifying patterns, analyzing research and helping us get to answers faster.

That’s incredibly powerful.

But I’m not sure looking at more automatically means we’re seeing more. Sometimes the interesting thing isn’t the biggest pattern. It’s the small thing that doesn’t quite fit.

Pay attention to the workaround

I’ve always been fascinated by workarounds.

Give me a customer who has created a spreadsheet, sticky note, side process or completely unexpected way of using a product and I immediately want to know why.

• What problem were they trying to solve?

• Why didn’t the product work for them?

• What do they understand about their job that we don’t?

Some of our best insights don’t start with a customer saying, “I need this feature.”

They’re much quieter.

• It’s the hesitation before someone clicks.

• The extra steps they’ve stopped thinking about because they’ve done them a thousand times.

• The spreadsheet they export everything into because it’s easier to work there.

• The customer who tells us something is “fine” while showing us a workflow that clearly isn’t.

Those little moments are easy to miss when we’re focused on getting to the answer.

Sometimes the workaround is the insight.

Stay curious a little longer

One of the things I’ve learned throughout my career is the value of not jumping immediately into solution mode.

That’s hard for designers. We like solving problems. It’s also hard for product teams under pressure to deliver. But sometimes we need to sit with an observation a little longer.

• Why did they do that?

• Why is this easy for one customer and difficult for another?

• Why are they leaving our product to finish the job?

• What’s actually happening here?

Photography gives me a similar experience.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want to photograph. Other times, something just catches my attention.

• So I move closer.

• I step back.

• I change the angle.

• I wait.

• I look again.

I’m not necessarily trying to make the first view work. I’m trying to understand what made me stop in the first place.

There’s something about that mindset that feels very familiar.

Change the frame

This might be my favorite connection between photography and product design.

• Change the frame and you change what you see.

• Zoom in and a tiny detail becomes the subject.

• Step back and suddenly you understand the environment around it.

• Move a few feet and something that was distracting disappears—or something much more interesting comes into view.

We frame problems in product development too. We frame them through customer segments, business goals, metrics, research questions, feature requests and technical constraints. We need those frames. They help us create clarity.

But every once in a while, I think we need to step back and ask:

What’s sitting just outside the frame?

• What happens before the customer gets here?

• What happens after?

• Whose experience aren’t we seeing?

• What assumption have we made so many times that we’ve stopped questioning it?

Sometimes changing the frame helps us find a better solution. Sometimes it shows us we’re solving the wrong problem.

AI makes this more important, not less

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as AI changes how we work.

We can process more customer feedback. Explore more ideas. Prototype faster. Find patterns across huge amounts of information.

I love that.

But I also think it makes curiosity and observation even more important.

AI can help surface the pattern.

• We still have to notice what matters.

• We have to wonder why one comment doesn’t fit.

• We have to ask the next question.

• We have to understand the context behind what we’re seeing.

And we have to decide when something is interesting enough to explore further.

Those are very human parts of product development.

Maybe we don’t always need to move faster

I talk a lot about creating clarity and momentum for teams.

But momentum isn’t just speed.

Sometimes moving a team forward means giving them permission to stop and look at something differently.

• To explore the unexpected.

• To challenge how we’ve framed the problem.

• To spend a little more time understanding before we start building.

Photography has been a good reminder of that for me.

I’ve stood waiting for a bird to move into the light. I’ve changed my position because a composition wasn’t quite working. And I’ve come home and found something in a photograph that I didn’t fully appreciate when I took it.

It was there all along. I just had to notice it. I think our customers are showing us things all the time too.

Maybe one of the most important skills we can bring to product design isn’t knowing the answer. It’s staying curious long enough to notice the better question.