Design without process, or the form factor trap
From the inside (fastest) outwards (slowest), the design process is a series of loops involving different audiences. Each loop poses a new question with the associated artifacts and activities — and the answer serves as an input for the next loop up.
In the short term, learning to reach the peak of visual fidelity in the complete absence of conceptual fidelity was a very useful capability. But in doing so, we compromised the very thing that made design valuable.
The value of design isn’t actually in producing visual artifacts, but in the process that leverages those artifacts. Documenting a design decision in a visual artifact — that can be disseminated among appropriate audiences — is what makes that decision tangible and testable. Cycling through that feedback loop between design decisions, visual documentation, and the audience — and increasing the fidelity of both your thinking and your artifacts — is how design works.
Incomplete inputs lead to incomplete outputs
When that loop is taken apart, and stakeholders pick and choose what they want designers to do, the value evaporates. It’s not so much a matter of those stakeholders being wrong (the loop of the design process embraces being wrong) but about the inputs being incomplete.
And incomplete inputs lead to incomplete outputs. Not visually incomplete, but conceptually incomplete: artifacts that superficially look like those produced via a complete design process, and yet don’t carry any meaningful information within them, because the decisions they were supposed to document were never made.
See ⮂ Also
⭐⭐⭐ The Design Squiggle Damien Newman The Design Squiggle is a simple illustration of the design process. The journey of researching, uncovering insights, generating creative concepts, iteration of prototypes and eventually concluding in one single designed solution. It is intended to convey the feeling of the journey. Beginning on the left with mess and uncertainty and ending on the right in a single point of focus: the design.
⭐⭐ Pace layering - Fashion
- Commerce
- Infrastructure
- Governance
- Culture
- Nature
Prototypes, production & fidelity layers Trys Mudford There’s still undoubtably a place for throwaway prototypes, but that doesn’t mean production code can’t learn a thing or two from the prototype mindset.
...We don’t build ‘a web application’, we build hundreds of features, services & components that unite to form an application. Each of these chunks exists along [the pace layer] spectrum, and don’t have to be placed in the production camp. Not from day one. We can play with the form.