I don't have a design process
The best design process is no design process at all — It's a mental model.
I have a confession to make: I don’t have a design process. I know, crazy, right?
I see a lot of designers getting attached to a specific process, whether it be the famous double diamond or any other fancy-word-based process that exists out there.
The thing is, the perfect design process doesn’t exist. All we have are designers that are too romantic to understand that, so they try to push these processes down the business throat. And it fails.
Business often times beat on a different rhythm. Have you ever heard of agile? Scrum? If you take a closer look, 99% of tech companies are doing development sprints of 2 weeks — which I think is dumb by the way, but that’s a convo for another day.
How do you place a design process inside a 2 week sprint? The answer is: You don’t. That’s why some companies run the “design sprint” prior to the development.
Sometimes one or two sprints before so that developers have artifacts that they can code and deliver.
I don’t like to use any specific design process because often times they are too long to be effective in a agile environment, to complex to be done with a small team (or no team at all — solo designers, I’m looking at you), or both.
Don’t get me wrong, bigger teams and bigger companies definitely need some sort of process in place, that’s why positions like DesignOps or designers focusing on Design System are so popular lately.
I’m just provoking you to think what is actually necessary to build products that deliver value and what is just designers pumping their ego and complicating things.
Designers are the only “species” that try to solve problems for others by creating problems for themselves with crazy methodologies that more often than not, don’t apply to the real world.
I pride myself in my ability to be pragmatic. I’ve never been romantic about my designs. In all of my work, I try to check 3 items:
Is this helping the business grow?
Are the people using the product satisfied?
Did I do my best?
If I check those 3 items, I’m happy. And there are a lot of ways to achieve that. There are hundreds of design processes out there, if not more. And all of them use the same starting point: Design Thinking. So why do we complicate things?
Take a look at the design process (above image) that I used on a recent project. Looks simple enough, right? But inside each section there are a lot of meetings, foundational research and back and forth communication to keep everyone on the same page.
And of course we have to consider many other things like: People, existing knowledge, psychology, team maturity and so on.
The caveat is: I didn’t had that process before starting, I just followed a design thinking mental model and documented things along the way.
That process right there could be completely different for another project for example. And that’s the beauty of following the design thinking principles instead of a well written design process.
At the end of the day, our jobs is to bring value to people and the company. Anything else is just distraction.
All I can say is:
Be curious enough to understand the problem
Talk to AT LEAST 5 people about their problems
Test and measure things with intention
That’s it, that’s the “secret” recipe.
Whether you’re working on a 2 weeks sprint or 6 weeks sprint, it doesn’t matter. Design thinking works as a mental model.
Understand the problem (be curious), explore possible solutions (talk to people and iterate upon feedback) and materialize the solution (test and implementation). That’s Design Thinking 101.
So, Designers, I encourage you to be more pragmatic. To put our egos to the side and actually focus on what matters: Delivering value to people and companies.
Enjoy being imperfect. Design is not written in stone.
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Thank you for reading.