Why designers love Post-it notes

It's a cliché how much designers love to pull out the post-its in a workshop. Sometimes, sceptics will make fun of it, saying, "We just spent an hour in a room moving coloured paper around on the wall”

But there is more to the humble Post-it than its colourful aesthetics. They are a valuable tool in the designer's and facilitator's toolbox. So what is it about Post-its that designers love so much?

They Encourage Quantity Over Depth

"It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas." – Charles Péguy

There are some parts in the design process where you are "going wide." You want to explore all the options rather than getting stuck in the weeds on a few. Post-its can help here. People will fill whatever writing space you give them; if you give them a blank A4 page, they are likely to fill it with extra detail that isn't needed. Post-its require you to be direct. The "one idea per note" rule encourages participants to go for quantity over depth, which is not natural for some people.

Generally, people's early ideas are obvious, and you want to encourage them to get past those to reach the more interesting stuff. Post-its help here.

They Help You Say It Simply

"I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter." — Blaise Pascal

Saying things simply can be a challenge. To fit your point onto the small sticky note, you need to say it clearly and succinctly. It can be easy to hide behind jargon and complex language if you have infinite room to write, but having a post-it note that needs to be understandable to others forces you to think about what you really want to get across. No hiding in complexity or floral language—keep it short, sharp, and clear.

They Encourage Finding Connections and Patterns

"Creativity is just connecting things." — Steve Jobs

One of the key benefits of Post-it notes is they allow you to move them around, to stick them on a wall and find connections or groups. Again, if everything is written in a big block of text, this is much harder to do. Sense-making is one of the hardest parts of the design process to grasp. This visual form of sense-making makes finding new and novel connections more intuitive and accessible to less experienced designers and co-designers.

They Create Shared Ownership

"None of us is as smart as all of us." — Ken Blanchard

In some groups, people will get fixated on "their" idea or insight and find it hard to move past it. It could be an ego thing or a preconceived idea that they really want to make fit. By getting all those ideas out from people and onto the wall with other people's ideas, it removes individual ownership. Ideas are grouped and built upon. Suddenly, it's no longer one person's idea but a shared idea. This makes it easier for people to hold the ideas lightly and take critique. People are talking about a shared idea, rather than you as a person.

They Are Easy to Throw Away

"Kill your darlings." — William Faulkner

A hard part for people newer to design is throwing away stuff that isn't working. It feels wasteful. The more effort and time you put into something, the harder it is to throw away. Post-it notes take 30 seconds to write, making them easier to discard. We can quickly throw away or rewrite a post-it without anyone feeling precious. This makes it easier to "fall in love with the problem and not the solution."

They Break Things Into Smaller Pieces

"How do you eat an elephant? One spoon at a time." – Proverbial expression

Part of the design process is working at different scales, zooming in and out, and gaining more understanding of both the problem and solution. To understand a problem, we need to break it up into smaller pieces and interrogate each one.

For example, instead of thinking about a service as one big thing, we can think of it as a series of steps along a journey. Each step can be broken down into smaller pieces, and we can use colour to understand different components like barriers or opportunities.

We do the same thing with a solution, breaking it down into its component pieces. This makes it easier to pull out and work on a bit at a time, and iterate stuff that's not working.

They Are Colourful and Fun

"Creativity is intelligence having fun." – Albert Einstein

This is not a trivial point. Part of running a workshop is creating a space where people are encouraged to think differently. We want to move people from the closed and problem-focused mindset that is dominant in society to an open, curious, and even playful space. Adding colour and materiality to a space can help with that. We could take notes on grey worksheets individually, or we could work together on the wall with colourful Post-its.

They Encourage Collaboration

"The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other." — Thomas Stallkamp

Post-its as we've seen, make it easier to break up problems and reassemble them or to find connections between different things. The act of standing in front of a wall and moving stuff around is an embodied way to build a shared understanding. You are actively building something together, and this feeling of collaboration builds a sense of trust and connection.

I'm sure there are more. How do you use post-it notes? Do you miss them in our increasingly remote world? Do digital tools like Miro feel the same?