How to nail your design decisions everytime

The brain has 2 different decision-making modes, and most designers don't realize they are constantly switching between them. Worse, they often use the wrong mode for the wrong type of decision, which is why some design choices feel impossible and others feel obvious. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to recognize which decision-making mode you need for any design problem and how to avoid the traps that lead to bad design decisions using the simple 3-step framework that I have developed over time in my role as a senior product designer at Monzo Bank and my previous role at Deliveroo. This framework will make your decision-making faster and more confident. But first, you need to understand what's really happening in your brain when you make design decisions. Picture this morning routine: you open your eyes, yawn, stretch, and pick up your phone for your mandatory 10 minutes of doom scrolling. You shouldn't pick up your phone first thing in the morning, but I'm not judging. Everything you do on your phone in that first 10 minutes of waking up happens automatically until you see a notification from a friend asking if you'd like to hang out for drinks next weekend. Suddenly, you stop and think, What am I doing next weekend? Do I have plans? Do I even want to see this friend? Your brain shifts into a different gear, weighing options and consequences. Then you ignore the message for now because you need time to think, and then you get out of bed. So here's what just happened. You seamlessly switched between 2 completely different thinking modes. Grabbing your phone was automatic, but responding to an unexpected social invitation required more thinking. Both decisions involve your phone, but your brain handled them in really different ways. These 2 modes of thinking show up in almost everything we do as designers, and every design decision we make From simple things like choosing button colors to restructuring entire user flows, understanding which mode you're using changes everything about how you approach problem solving. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman discovered that our brains make decisions in 2 distinct ways: the fast mode and the slow mode. The fast mode is your brain's automatic decision maker. It's instant, it's intuitive, it runs on pattern recognition based on things that it already identifies. So when you look at a layout and immediately you think the spacing needs to be tighter, or you think the font feels off. That's fast mode making a selection without any conscious effort. The slow mode is your brain's analytical decision maker. It's deliberate, logical, and requires a bit more concentration. When you're weighing whether to use a modal or a slide-out panel based on research findings, that's slow mode carefully working through the options. Here's what this looks like in real design work. The type of design decisions you're likely to make in fast mode are things like choosing between 2 font weights for a heading, deciding whether to left-align or center-align your text, picking which UI components to use for an already established or common pattern, adjusting colors to improve visual hierarchy. These are things you just do based on gut feeling and intuition. The types of decisions you are likely to make in slow mode are things like determining your information architecture for a complex app, deciding between 3 fundamentally different approaches to a feature, evaluating whether your design actually solves the user's problem, choosing which user feedback to act on when you have multiple opinions from stakeholders and it's conflicting. Both of these modes are essential. Fast mode allows you to make hundreds of micro decisions efficiently. Slow mode lets you slow down to tackle complex problems that doesn't have obvious answers. But the problem is fast mode can be so convincing that it often tricks you into making the wrong decision with complete confidence. Fast mode is incredible at making quick decisions, but it has lots of predictable blind spots. So when you make important decisions in fast mode that you should have done in slow mode, you end up with solutions that feel right in the moment but might not actually work in reality. And there are some traps that you may fall in when you design in fast mode when you should be going slower. These decision-making traps have cost me personally weeks of wasted work. And once you learn to spot these traps that I will explain shortly, you see them everywhere in your own work and even other designers' work as well. The first trap is that you solve the wrong problem because it looks familiar. Your brain sees a new problem and instantly matches it to something familiar, then jumps to that solution. For example, let's say John, a mid-level designer at an agency, has designed a really great dashboard for financial advisors. The dashboard has dense data and it worked perfectly for the clients. Now, John's next project is to design a dashboard that helps teachers grade their students, so he uses the same dense data-heavy approach without realizing teachers need something quite different. The decision feels right because John has made it successfully before, but context matters, and designing in fast mode doesn't pay much attention to context. Instead, it uses familiar patterns. The second trap is that you fall in love with your first idea. Designing in fast mode helps you develop an idea you like quickly and then unconsciously filters everything else to support that idea. For example, in user research, you remembered users who loved your concept but could downplay the ones that struggled with it. It's not like you're being dishonest. Your brain is just biased towards your first idea because it's tricking you into getting stuck in fast mode. So you can use less brainpower. So your brain is actually just trying to be efficient. It's doing its job. The 3rd trap is you let recent trends override good judgment. So let's say you read a case study about how Spotify used a particular design pattern. So suddenly that design pattern seems like the answer to every problem. And it's the classic scenario of assuming every problem is a nail because you have a hammer or using AI as your solution to every problem because it's the new trendy technology. Recent memories feel more important than they actually are, and this cues your decision-making. So how do you know when to trust your gut and design fast and when to slow down? That's exactly what the next framework I'll talk about solves. This 3-phase framework has transformed how I personally approach design decisions. It's the difference between spending 3 hours on a decision that should take 10 minutes or 10 minutes on a decision that should take 3 hours. Without a framework, you're just guessing at which mode you should use, and sometimes you overthink simple decisions and then sometimes you rush complex ones. The framework removes the guesswork and helps you match the right thinking mode to each decision. So think of this like a GPS for your decision-making. It tells you which mode you need based on where you are in the exact process. The first step of the framework is to start with slow mode for these scenarios: whenever the problem isn't clearly defined yet, whenever you don't understand the user's context or constraints, whenever stakeholders have conflicting opinions about what is needed, whenever you're working in an unfamiliar domain or for a new type of users. Or whenever the decision will significantly impact user experience. This is when you need to step out of Figma and step into the real world to ask questions like, what problem am I actually solving? What does success look like? What do I need to understand before I explore solutions? For every minute that you spend designing in Figma, you should spend like 5 to 10 minutes finding answers to these questions before jumping into Figma. So let's say you are designing a checkout flow and you are likely to spend 10 hours in total in Figma. You should spend 3 to 6 days trying to understand the problem, talking to stakeholders, and identifying the success metrics. Don't just rush into Figma without having answers to this question. Like, the 3 to 6 days analogy is just like an example, but what I'm trying to say is you should spend more time than you actually spend in Figma trying to uncover the problem. The second step of the framework is to switch to fast design mode for these scenarios where you clearly understand the problem you're solving, where you need to generate multiple options quickly, where you are working with familiar patterns and standard UI components. Or you are making visual refinement decisions, or maybe time is a major constraint and you need to make progress really fast. Now you can trust your intuition, sketch rapidly with as little editing as possible. This is the time to use the patterns that you already know work and then make visual decisions based on what feels right. You need to be able to generate as many ideas as possible instead of perfecting one when you are in fast mode. Using the checkout example again, now that you understand the problem you want to solve, you can switch to fast mode to explore quick solutions. Sketch as many different layout approaches in as little time as possible. This is not the time to start overthinking. You just want to get as many options and ideas out there as possible so that you don't fall into the trap of falling in love with your first idea. The 3rd step of the framework is to return to slow mode in scenarios where you now need to choose between multiple concepts, you need to validate whether your solution actually works, in scenarios where you are making decisions that impact usability or accessibility, or you need to explain your rationale to coders, or you're finalizing the details before development. Now you can take your checkout flow sketches back to slow mode, evaluate each against success criteria, which one actually addresses the user's problem you've identified. Your favorite design might not be the one that works best, but designing in slow mode here helps you make that call objectively. Notice the rhythm: slow mode to understand, fast mode to explore, and then slow mode to evaluate. This rhythm prevents both overthinking simple solutions and rushing into the wrong solution. Now, there's a tool that can make this framework even more powerful or completely derail you if you use it wrongly. And it's the obvious elephant in the room. AI. It's an inevitable topic at this point. So yeah, I have to cover that. So what role can AI tools play when switching between slow mode and fast mode as a designer? AI is essentially a fast mode amplifier. It's brilliant at rapid exploration and generating variations, but it struggles to do the slow mode work of understanding context, evaluating trade-offs, or making judgment calls specific to your actual situation if you don't prompt it properly. There's no right or wrong way to use AI in the design process, but in my own work, I've discovered that AI is incredibly valuable when I've done the slow mode work of understanding the problem, mapping out flows so that I can then ask AI tools like V0, Lovable, or Figma Make to generate layout variations or suggest alternative interaction patterns or even create different visual directions. This speeds up the exploration phase without replacing the thinking that I have to do when I switch to slow mode. Better design decisions aren't about being smarter or more experienced. They're about knowing which decision-making mode to use and when to switch between them. Now, mastering decision-making is powerful, but the hard truth is That's just one skill. I've watched designers nail their process but still struggle to get buy-in on their ideas because they're missing other crucial lessons that only come from years of experience. I spent 9 years learning this the hard way and making expensive mistakes. Eventually, I figured out what actually matters for career growth, and I've distilled all of it into this video right here. The 9 biggest lessons from 9 years of being a designer. This is stuff I wish someone had told me on day one. So go watch that video and I'll see you there.