Designing for humans can be an exciting, intellectually challenging, and usually an arduous journey. Seasoned UI/UX designers know that coming up with a simple and elegant solution isn’t always easy. But don’t fret, I’ve got an old design system that’ll help you solve design problems with help from biology.
“Clone, evolve, repeat.”
If you’ve been keeping an eye out on AI these days (which you really should), you’ll notice a strong similarity between these programs and the ruthlessness of biology. These AI systems are designed to attempt a task, usually fail, clone itself with a slight mutation and repeat the process to get a perfered outcome. By experimenting and failing repeatedly; the survival of the strongest designs floats to the top. It’s just a matter of time.
So how can this help us design better? When you have your first design solution, create a clone of it, experiement, tweak, and change it. After creating 5–10 mutations of a design, share the ideas (or prototypes) to others to test your assumptions frequently. Obeserve the best ideas, get rid of the rest and try merging the best into a new design, then repeat this process until the desired outcome is reached.
Finally, don’t be afraid to canibalize the weak ideas to make stronger ones. Clone, evolve, repeat. Switch between 2 states of mind: Play around when in experimentation mode, then switch to a ruthless idea killer in filtration mode. If an idea won’t die and it keeps popping up, you might have a winner.
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