I feel like every website is similar nowadays, no? Our shared focus on simplicity, familiarity, and flat design — although it provides a great user experience — makes it very difficult to differentiate our products from everything else.
This challenge, however, also provides a great opportunity.
Designers who can break the rut and bring some freshness into their design while still maintaining key UX principles in mind can create memorable experiences that stick.
But if every website and product looks almost the same, how does one get the so-much-needed invitation to breathe new life into designs? Where does the design inspiration come from?
Well, there are a few interesting tactics. And in this blog, I’ll share my ideas.
Let’s explore seven of my favorite ways to get a healthy dose of design inspiration whenever you are stuck recooking the same patterns over and over again.
The easiest yet often overlooked way to move creative juices is to increase the amount of ideated concepts rapidly.
The point is that your first idea will probably fit already well-established patterns and common practices. Your second to fifth idea will deviate slightly. But what about your seventh or tenth idea? After you chew through your initial thoughts, you need to get increasingly creative with each idea generated.
An excellent exercise to rapidly explore concepts is to start each screen or feature with Crazy 8s. The goal is to develop eight significantly different ideas on designing a particular screen.
During this minute or so, you probably won’t come up with a perfect solution for the problem you are designing for, but most likely, you will end up with some new concepts that break the pattern. Use these as inspiration in further development.
Behance and Dribbble are still quite decent resources when it comes to getting inspiration, especially the latter.
The reason for that is that most designers use these platforms to showcase their UI and design skills, not necessarily to design UX-friendly and business-optimized interfaces. Designs there tend to be more creative and flashy than you’d normally see in products.
You can take it a step further and focus on different industries. If you are an ed-tech mobile app designer, don’t just focus on edtech designs. Take a look at creative e-commerce, fintech, or social media concepts. You might find something intriguing in other industries that might be worth borrowing.
For some reason, designers tend to brainstorm almost exclusively with other designers. Although I understand the appeal of working with people who understand basic principles and have design experience, it’s putting you in a sort of bubble of ideas.
To get out of the design bubble, consider brainstorming with other people. I don’t mean only product managers, developers, and QA. You can go as far as inviting your company accountants, recruiters, and legal folks to participate.
The farther the people are from the product development process, the less tainted they’ll be by “best practices” and “how it should be done” and the more creative ideas you can get.
The more you limit yourself, the more creative you need to be to solve a challenge.
Try experimenting with designs that have some absurd limitations. Say you are designing a landing page. A few examples of creative constraints could include:
and so on.
The chances that you’ll design a great landing page with constraints like that are slim, but these constraints will force you to develop creative workarounds that might be reusable in the proper design.
GenAI, such as ChatGPT, can be a very helpful tool when it comes to ideating, but you need to do it right.
Say you are designing a habit tracker. If you prompt GenAI with something generic, such as “give me 10 ideas on the layout for the homepage of a habit tracker”, you’ll get very generic answers. After all, the GenAI is trained on public data so it tends to be on the less creative side.
But if you add a twist to a prompt, things change. Try commands such as:
And so on.
Long story short, GenAI CAN get creative. You just need to explicitly ask for it.
Consciously breaking key design patterns can lead to intriguing results.
For example, when Tinder launched, the common navigation pattern was to use clicks – users had to click a button or arrow to move between screens. Tinder broke the pattern, introducing an unconventional “swipe” gesture.
Pinterest is another example. Symmetric layouts were a cornerstone of digital interfaces for decades, but Pinterest was one of the first big products to consciously break the pattern with a staggered layout grid, creating a unique experience.
I am not saying you must break the final product pattern. I understand it might be difficult to pull off and get buy-in for it. But for exploration alone, imagine there are no limitations; try to break every pattern you know and see what new ideas and concepts emerge. Then, figure out how you can apply these concepts in the final designs.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the most effective. If you are stuck, just take a break and go for a walk, jog, or simply take a nap.
I’ve very rarely found an innovative solution to a problem when intensely thinking about it. On the contrary, my best ideas popped up when I was thinking about something completely unrelated.
I know I am not alone in that one.
Creativity is an essential part of product design. Although our objective is to design UX-friendly interfaces, which often mean simplicity and familiarity with existing products, a spark of creative innovation here and there can help differentiate your product and design memorable experiences.
I encourage you to accommodate some time every week for what I call “creativity exercises.”
These can include
Even if you don’t come up with immediately applicable concepts during these exercises, they’ll help you keep a fresh perspective and have a bank of crazy concepts in the back of your mind, which might come in handy in unexpected situations.
At the end of the day, what differentiates a good designer from a great designer? A good designer designs solid solutions that are intuitive, usable, accessible, and inclusive. A great designer adds a spark of creativity on top of that to create truly unique experiences.
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