NICE Design Process
Design does not start with a solution. It starts with a situation. NICE gives you four simple steps to understand the situation, make something, test it, and improve it.
Start with the Situation
What is happening? Who is involved? Where will the design be used? What might change?
The situation is the frame around the whole design process. If the situation changes, your needs, research, design, and evaluation may need to change too.
N: Needs & Necessities
Ask: What must the design do, and what would make it better?
A need is a clear requirement. It should usually be testable as yes or no.
- Need: must weigh less than 10 kg.
- Need: must fit inside a 500 mm space.
A necessity is something where more or less can be better. It can be scored or weighted.
- Necessity: lighter is better.
- Necessity: easier to use is better.
- Necessity: more durable is better.
A necessity can become a need when the situation requires it. “Lightweight” is a preference until the situation says the object must weigh less than 10 kg.
I: Inquire & Investigate
Ask: What do we need to learn before we decide what to make?
Look at users, existing products, materials, measurements, experiments, books, websites, videos, AI tools, and ideas from other fields.
For useful inquiry, record four things:
- What did you investigate?
- How did you investigate it?
- What did you learn?
- How could that change your design?
Good designers rarely start from nothing. They study what already exists, borrow useful ideas, combine technologies, and improve them for a new situation.
C: Create & Communicate
Ask: What is the simplest thing we can make that lets us test and explain the idea?
That might be a sketch, cardboard model, CAD model, circuit, mock-up, code prototype, or working part.
Do not wait for a perfect final product. Make enough to learn something, show it to other people, and get useful feedback.
E: Evaluate
Ask: Did it work, and are we still solving the right problem?
Test the design against the requirements you wrote earlier:
- Does it meet every need? Pass or fail.
- How well does it meet each necessity? Score and compare.
- What did testing or feedback teach you?
- Were the original needs and necessities correct?
- Did the situation change?
Evaluation is not the end. What you learn sends you back around the NICE cycle.
A quick example: how phones changed
A landline telephone solved long-distance voice communication, but it kept the user attached to a wire. Radio communication allowed people to communicate while moving. Combining ideas from telephone networks and radio helped make mobile phones possible.
Then the situation kept changing. People wanted smaller phones, text messaging, email, cameras, maps, internet access, apps, and eventually communication that could move onto watches and other wearables.
The important idea is not that one person invented the modern phone. It is that designers kept investigating existing ideas, combining them, testing them, and responding to changing needs.
Remember
Situation -> N -> I -> C -> E -> repeat
The goal is not to get the first design right. The goal is to learn enough each cycle to make the next decision better.
Use NICE on your first project
You do not need a complicated invention to learn the design process. A simple product such as a name tag is enough. You can define what it must do, rank what would make it better, investigate possible solutions, build a version, test it, and then improve it.
Use the NICE Project Builder to organize and document the process.
Start with the name-tag activity for your course: