Don't trust the (design) process

absolutely not starting a newsletter

For a good period of time, between like, 2014–2020, design was all about The Process. You know it. Yeah, that’s the one:

Instead of portfolios of mockups or prototypes, it was all these artifacts — journeys, flows, personas, user stories. Proof of the process.

And our output started looking more like this:

We stopped caring so much about the actual design of the thing — what people actually saw or felt when they used the thing we made. And we self-indulged in all the “practice of design”.

And, I get why we did this! Ten or fifteen years ago, most designers were traditionally graphic designers and a lot of early software design focused on just making something pretty and shiny. But, designing software was complex — you had a real human being on the other side, interacting with a complex system in a multitude of ways you couldn’t anticipate.

All of sudden, we weren’t just designing something visual, but we needed to understand human behaviour, to see ourselves in other people’s contexts (don’t get me started on our empathy phase!!!), to learn how the decisions we made could affect a company’s bottom line, etc.

But along the way, we lost something. The actual work we were producing. We spent so much time trying to decode our users in so many ways — a persona! Then a journey! Then a user flow! Then a lo-fi wireframe! Then a concept test! We focused on it so much, that we deemed the pixels unserious and unimportant.

We stopped doing the real thing that would be the most empathetic, useful, and that would actually serve business outcomes best: building stuff that worked well and that people would love.

We became servants to the process, following it step by step every single time, saying stuff like “trust the process.” We made designers feel like their work wasn’t complete if they didn’t start from a perfectly articulated problem statement.

The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s changing things after we’ve handed off the design. It’s starting from the solution first. It’s operating on vibes and intuition. It’s making something just for the sake of making people smile. It’s a feeling that we nailed it.

It’s knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It’s the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it’s a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like.

It’s messy and I wouldn’t have it any other way.