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.
Hey there, veteran here and wanted to reflect on this because in part, I wholly agree.
Why we sell the process of design
10 years ago we were 10 years into the struggle of getting investment from businesses into designing the right thing to build the right thing (in digital products, far, far longer for physical products).
Nobody was willing to pay for the time required to actually figure out what needed to be created. Before 2005 we called this R&D, Research and Development - and nobody wanted to pay for research, and definately not if it didn't result in a THING at the end.
In 2024 it's the same challenge with a different motivation.
Businesses are broke, trying to operate in a broken global market and nobody wants to pay to design the right thing before building the right thing. They want to pay for a thing they can sell immediately and generate revenue.
Whilst I don't disagree with the sentiment that the end result of the product that's delivered can be deemphasised a lot in particular in digital product design, there is still a need to influence and persuade those people that own budgets that spending time figuring out what needs to be made is still the most cost effective way of ensuring you don't build the wrong thing.
This is ultimately the designers struggle, and will always be that way
I kind of agree! Though I think it's nuanced. I think the real value of formalising a design process is to help those who don't have the kind of learned, internalised design instinct that designers will have. For those who already have that, the process is unnecessary, and probably a bit frustrating.
For context I worked for several years for Design Council in the UK, who pioneered the Double Diamond design process. It's been a transformative tool for many but I think the primary value has been to bring design to non-designers. To anyone with these instincts already, it was obvious from the beginning!
It's often hard for non-designers to have the confidence to work in a messy, fuzzy design context, and when they don't necessarily know what good looks and feels like, the process gives confidence and guide rails. Over time, and with enough practice, those instincts develop. Even if they don't, they gain a lot from the structure.
One of the trickiest things is trying to get designers (to whom this is second nature) to effectively communicate what they are doing and the value of it to non-designers (who probably think it is woolly, and results in expensive nice-looking things. So it also breaks down the intuitive value of the process to non-designers and helps build confidence in their involvement.