When you think about products that started a trend, that set the bar high, that changed the status quo through their design or interaction, we see products that are inherently creative and designed exceptionally well.

Apple iPhones changed the way smartphones work. When button phones were main stream, apple created something new with a single button touch screen. Another example is Tinder, the swipe action was invented by them. They could have gone with the traditional accept, reject buttons, but they did something new, something which was never done before. Snapchat did disappearing messages which was eventually adopted by Instagram and WhatsApp.

Amazingly done products are creative and delightful. A parallel that I see in solving creative product problems is with Logo design. You have a brief, and after many iterations and an epiphany, you have an amazing looking mark. Similar is the process of product design. After we have the brief (discovery and validation), we have a free canvas to structure the product experience. But do we really push the envelope? Do we really try to think outside the box? Do we really challenge the obvious flow, the logical flow, the safe flow? Type form created amazing forms by coming up with a new swipe interaction.

More often than not, we don't give enough time to the creative process in product development. We go with the first solution that solves the problem. This flow, although it solves the problem, though rarely creates delight. An article I read some years back from Intercom mentioned that most companies spend 80-90% of their product sprint cycle in development and only 10-20% in product discovery and the problem space. If we spend more time in discovery and solutioning, we would be able to develop creative and better solutions to hard problems. Allocating more time from the development phase to the solutioning and validation phase can help achieve this.

To more creative solutions and amazing designs. Cheers !