Why You Should Be Building Your Personal Knowledge Base for Design

When I was a student, I came across countless theories, activities, and deliverables in design. However, it wasnt always clear to me how theyd fit into an overall process I could use in the industry. Thus, I wanted to create a personal design playbook that encapsulates everything Ive learned into a practical resource for work.

In my search for the ideal tool, I discovered Notion. Its elegant interface and ability to create links seamlessly between notes won me over after years of using Evernote. I also came across the concept of a personal knowledge base: an always up-to-date centralized space of interlinking notes that would let me easily express and find information tailored to my understanding.

Creating one is what Tiago Forte, an expert in digital productivity, calls building a second brain a perspective with a lot of powerful ideas that I resonate with.Why build a knowledge base?To build a personal knowledge base (PKB) is to adopt a proactive approach in note-taking.

Youre not writing just to remember, but to also self-reflect for personal growth and to clarify your understanding of the world. As a designer, you may use a wide range of research, ideation, and production methods to solve a problem. Instead of always looking for scattered bits of best practices from articles and books, you can document your process in your PKB and use it as a framework to move your project forward with confidence, knowing when to use a method and why.

Another benefit of having a PKB is youll be more deliberate with how you capture and distill information. Instead of spending time to find and re-absorb research insights youve encountered before, you can quickly access them in a curated form from your repository to help you make informed design decisions.Ultimately, your knowledge base is an extension of your mind that will augment your thinking as you design.

Let me show you how you could establish one using Notion. Making sense of your processA good way to start is by outlining your entire design process as a framework in a top-level index page. Take the time to reflect on how you approach a problem from end-to-end: What questions do you have at each stage?

What are the activities and tools you can use to answer them? Who are the stakeholders involved? What deliverables can you create to communicate and to align your team around?

As you write, be flexible with the structure and note any gaps in your knowledge.I recommend using lists and toggles instead of writing in paragraphs and headings. This forces you to add concise and digestible content with a clear hierarchy, so its easy to see the relationship for each point.

Also, you can easily navigate and manipulate them in Notion using these convenient keyboard shortcuts:In block-selection mode (Esc), use left/right arrow keys to select the parent or child, and press Cmd Enter to expand/collapse a Toggle List.Cmd Shift T: Expand/collapse all Toggle Lists in the page. Cmd Shift Up/Down: Move a block up or down.

Making sense of the worldPart of being a designer is having a holistic understanding of the user, the business, and the larger context. However, its difficult to keep all this information clearly in mind while you design. This is where having a PKB and a reliable system for processing and retrieving information can come in handy.

Whenever I want to learn about a new topic or domain, such as the legal industry for my work at Clio, I use the following workflow:1) PlanBefore diving into resources, its important to be selective about which ones to consume. To guide my research, I usually create a top-level structured notes page around a broad topic I want to explore, such as Legal Industry, Interaction Design or Circular Economy. It follows this template:TitleA one-line summary of what this page is about.

TODOs: List of resources to review or improvements I want to make in Content.Content: Notes about the topic in the list form. References: Numbered list of links to pages (using @linking) and external resources referenced in Content.

I use [#] (footnotes) to refer back to these resources from inside Content, much like how Wikipedia does it. While not ideal, this is a convention I find to be the least obtrusive for inline resource referencing. Next, I list questions Im curious about and begin searching for resources that may answer them.

I try to be mindful of what information is worth my time by skimming through the content and queueing them in my reading list.2) CaptureWhen Im ready to go over a resource, I add a new page to my top-level Reading Notes database. This allows me to have a central view of everything Ive read and to filter them by author names and tags.

In the first pass of the content, I do a quick skim and list all of its headings in my note. In the second pass, I paraphrase the key points under each heading and drop in raw quotes I find meaningful to remember. Once complete, I highlight (Cmd Shift H) the most important snippets in case I need to review the note again.

3) DistillNext is to integrate the key points from the reading note back to my structured notes page. I use lists and hierarchy to organize the information into mental models that would make the most sense to me at a glance. As I write, I keep in mind the following principles:Write for your future self: Be concise and anticipate cues you may need (e.

g., highlights or diagrams) in the future to understand what youre saying right now.Treat every note as a work in progress: No page needs to be perfect expect to edit and shuffle things around to fit your changing needs.

Keep lists as flat as possible: Too much nesting is hard to follow. When needed, turn large key points into topical pages (e.g.

, User Interview, How Might We and Interaction Design). 4) RetrieveTo access whats in my knowledge base, I use Notions nifty Quick Find command (Cmd P) to jump to the relevant page. This method is often accurate enough to give me what I need at any moment.

For instance, when I had to rationalize a product decision based on the Lawyers Funnel for a stakeholder presentation, I jumped straight to that block in the Legal Industry page with minimal keystrokes. Then, I extracted the details of the mental model, curated in a way that I immediately understood.Overall, this workflow encourages you to be deliberate about gathering information and turning them into highly relevant content that you can quickly recall.

A well-maintained knowledge base can save you the time otherwise spent on searching for and reviewing fragmented resources from across the web or from your companys internal documentation. Closing ThoughtsMy hope is for more product designers to use their knowledge base to internalize everything theyve learned so they can always work with clear intents.You can start by documenting your process, using it as a guide to move your projects forward.

Then develop your approach for processing information efficiently, so its easy to reference the insights and mental models you need to make informed design decisions. Afterward, keep writing to learn, and explore other ways to make your tools work for you. Over time, the value of your knowledge base will grow and youll naturally leverage it to design with confidence.

Thanks for reading! Id love to hear from you: How do you currently document your design process? What other ways have you used your personal knowledge base to improve the way you work?

Let me know your thoughts and questions on Twitter or via a response below ResourcesFeel free to use the following Notion templates mentioned in the article:Further ReadingsBuilding a Second Brain: An OverviewDesigning a Personal KnowledgebaseHow I use Notion as a Repository for the UX ProcessCan writing make me a better designer?Writing as a thinking toolAlternative ToolsObsidian: Markdown-based knowledge base app that stores notes locallyTiddlyWiki: fully-featured personal wiki stored as a single HTML fileWorkFlowy: super simple text-only outliner with infinite nestingRoam Research: outliner with bi-directional linking geared towards researchPlain-text using the Zettelkasten methodThanks to Anneliese, James and Sean for supporting me with feedback. RELATED QUESTION How long do office chairs typically last before they need to be replaced?

Asanswered. I depends on the quality of chair and the level of use it gets.In the US an "office chair" can run from a $19.

99 internet special to a $1,000 super ergo deluxe designer chair. With about $200-600 range covering the bulk of chairs that you will find in a well equipped office. Cheap chairs have a life span in months under normal office use.

mid range chairs in years, high end chairs can last decades (I am sitting on a 15 year old Aeron and I am a big guy (6'3" 300 lbs. ). Level of use is important as well.

I work in the office furniture industry and I will tell you that the place that seems to be the hardest on chairs is 911 call centers. The stations are staffed 24/7, the people never leave their seats and I don't know if any study has been done, but they must hire inordinately large folks if the damage done to chairs I have seen as field returns are any indication. Being sent to a 911 call center is a sentence of life with hard labor to an office chair.