Design artifacts are important. Think journey maps, personas, wireframes, user research, written documents, charts, graphs, and everything else. These days they’re often stashed away in Google Docs or Figjam and in my career I’ve used all of these tools to help me understand how folks navigate complex software.
But I’ve also seen these design artifacts produced in a way that is bad for designers and even worse for the field itself.
Assets like these should be made to learn, to grow, to get in the headspace of someone using your product. And then—here’s the crucial bit—to apply that knowledge by shipping a fix. Make the interface faster, smoother, smaller! Tidy up messy UIs, make things more consistent, remove confusing words and endless clutter or junk! Discover whole new features that help customers!
So design artifacts are only useful if progress is made but often these assets lead nowhere and waste endless months investigating and talking with countless meetings in between.
There’s a factory-like production of the modern design process which believes that the assets are more important than the product itself. Bloated, bureaucratic organizations tend to like these assets because it absolves them of the difficulty of making tough decisions and shipping good design. They use these tools and documents and charts as an excuse not to fix things, to avoid the hard problems, to keep the status quo in check.
I’ve watched managers ask designers to produce endless artifacts and then judge them on the production of this flotsam instead of the output, the change, the way the product was improved by it. I’ve then watched designers spend months and months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and then still end up with junk design at the end. On the other side, I’ve also seen huge, big, beautiful projects ship without even needing to talk to a single customer or create a single Google Doc. Then I’ve watched those designers punished for not following some dumb made up process that often hinders more than it helps.
Again, this isn’t to say that these tools are useless. If they help us understand the problem and figure out next steps then that’s wonderful. But if we’re stuck in a never-ending cycle of producing documents that no one reads and making charts that never lead to a design that ships, then perhaps the whole field needs to rethink it’s approach to building products and shipping great design work.
Use the tools! Make the docs! Draw the diagrams!
But only if it leads to progress.