How do you validate your design decisions?

Our team often struggles with design decisions turning into debates based on personal preferences. We spend hours discussing button colors or layout options without any real data to back up our choices. How do other teams handle this? Is there a structured way to validate designs before development?

 

We faced exactly the same challenge until we implemented design validation practices. Instead of relying on opinions, we now test our designs with real users through methods like usability testing, A/B testing, and tree testing. The key is gathering objective data about how users actually interact with our designs rather than how we think they should. What really helped us was following a structured approach to design validation. We use a combination of quantitative data (like success rates and time-on-task) and qualitative feedback (user comments and pain points). This article on design validation from Clay Global provides a great framework for building this into your process: Design Validation . It covers everything from setting up proper tests to interpreting the results effectively.