The traditional, rigid design process is outdated and no longer effective in the current era of rapid technological advancement (especially AI), evolving roles, and resource constraints; designers must instead trust their intuition, adapt processes, and focus on craft and user experience to create valuable work.
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Okay, imagine this. It is the start of a
quarter. Your team has to figure out
what to do and you're like, "Cool. I
know exactly what to do. I know the
steps to follow." So, you go do some
some user research. You go and take that
user research and you make this persona.
It's perfect. It's got demographic data
and it's got a fake name and a and a
photo that you've generated. And from
that user persona, you make this perfect
user journey map and it shows every step
of this person's journey throughout your
product, all the problems they have, all
the emotional sequences that they're
going through. And then you as a
designer, you're like, "Okay, cool.
We're going to go lead a brainstorm and
bring all your crossunctional partners
in." And there you're going to
brainstorm all the problems that you can
solve to help meet your OKRs. And then
you write the perfect problem statement.
Maybe it starts with how might we maybe
it's actually in this format. It's like
as a blank I want to blank so that I can
blank so that way you can really
understand the user's goals and
problems. And then you're like, okay,
it's time for a brainstorm again. A lot
more sticky notes, except this time
you're brainstorming solutions instead
of problems. And then you pick a
solution. And you're like, cool, I'm
going to go do wireframes. I'm going to
do them really in lowfi first. And then
I'm going to go a little higher
fidelity, maybe like this. And then it's
time for research again. You're going to
take the solutions. You're going to
understand what problems there are from
users. And then they're gonna make them
higher fidelity and they're going to
look great like this. And hooray, you
just did this perfect design process.
You solved all the company's problems.
You made millions of dollars. You
created a a product that people really
love. Right.
Right. Yeah. I am calling
Also, hi, my name is Jenny Wen. I'm
normally based out of Brooklyn, New
York, but I'm actually from the Toronto
area in Canada. Work-wise, I'm a design
lead at Anthropic where I work on the
core claw.ai AI product which is a
chatbot built on top of the cloud
foundational models. I joined earlier
this year in January. But before that I
was at Figma for five and a half years
where I was director of design. I led
teams at a h that led a handful of new
products in our growth team. So Fig Jam,
slides community, Figma Buzz, site CMS
and our growth teams. And I was also the
first designer on Fig Jam and I took it
to launch and grew that team as well.
And before that I was at Dropbox for a
few years where I was a designer on
Dropbox paper. It's a document editor. I
don't know if you remember it. I just
got an email this week that they're
shutting down the mobile apps. Rest in
peace. Um, it was just one of the first
document editors that challenged the
norms of Google Docs and made it really
sort of pleasant to use. Okay, so where
were we? You know, you'd followed this
design process. You, you know, solved
world peace and you made this beautiful
product and you made so much money, right?
right?
Okay, so this is where you have that
like DJ Scratch sound effect. um that
did not sound very realistic at all,
right? But at the same time, that's the
process that everyone has been preaching
for the past few years and has been
taught to us in schools and maybe some
people even have like an MBA in this
process. But we actually need to do a
reality check of this environment that
we're in right now.
So, first thing to consider is AI. I
don't know, maybe you've heard of it,
but uh it stands for artificial
intelligence in case you actually
weren't aware.
Basically what's happening is tools are
changing. AI is making us more capable.
There are a bunch of new tools popping
up. I feel like there's new tools that
come up every day and I'm overwhelmed. I
don't know all the tools to try.
And the thing that's changing because of
this is basically a PM can get to a
working prototype faster than you can
write this perfect problem statement or
write a brainstorm. They do this without
doing any research, making any personas, etc.
etc.
And I've seen this at a few companies
now where actually it's the expectation
that product managers for example are
vibe coding or prototyping. And this is
something that just used to be the
designer's responsibility but now
becomes the responsibility of more and
more functions.
But at the same time it's also making
designers more powerful too. You know
it's no longer should designers code but
designers can code.
We don't have to just make static
pictures anymore. We can prototype
really easily and we can implement to
fit and finish all all by ourselves.
So the reality check here is that it's
outdated. The the design process is
really outdated for today's tools and
tech. It's feeling less and less right
for this moment.
Another thing I'm hearing a lot is do
less with more. I think this one's been
pretty universal for the past few years
and I'm hearing about this both from IC
designers as well as leaders across the industry.
industry.
There have been a lot of layoffs and
headcount reductions. Maybe you've been
impacted by it too, either as a leader
or a designer. And I think people are
just realizing that it's possible and
sometimes even more effective to have
smaller teams as well. It's less
coordination overhead. And I think small
teams are really powerful actually.
But at the same time, our roles are
evolving. You know, we have we were
designers. We had these existing
responsibilities that fell within our bucket.
bucket.
But because of things like AI, you know,
we are expected to span more and more
parts of our roles and that's actually
more possible like being more PMshaped
and strategic or also implementing and
prototyping our work. And I think the
exact same thing is also happening to
all these other functions around us.
So in this world, do we even have time
to follow this rigid process? Like what
could we be cutting from it to make room
for all these other things that we're
now expected to do? I think the good
thing is like I don't think we need all
And so the reality is our roles are
changing. We're expected to do more with
less and we just don't have time to
follow a process to a tea anymore.
I'm hearing more and more of these
words, you know, taste and craft and
quality. We're throwing these around
more and more and talking about them in
terms of the design process.
I think the running hypothesis that
comes from this is that in a world where
you can start to make anything with AI,
what really matters is your ability to
choose and curate what you make. I think
that's a good hypothesis.
Like if you can oneshot prompt something
that looks like this, what does that
mean for designers? Like this is not
really that good, but it does raise the
bar and that it raises the floor and the
baseline of what a designer's expected
to do. like your work has to be better
than this for you to be valuable and
somebody that could be hired.
I've also noticed that we're like
starting to gravitate towards apps like
this, like the not boring software apps.
Uh this one is called is this one is
their camera app which is just it's a
camera app but it's beautiful and it has
all these tactile knobs and sound
effects and it just feels delightful to
use. This doesn't feel like you could
just make it with a few prompts
or apps like Linear which it's it's a
task tracking app. We've all used
different task track tracking apps.
They're dime a dozen, but it's
wellcrafted. It's fast. It's snappy to
use. People like using it and prefer to
pay for it.
Or apps like Notion Calendar, which
again, it's like not that different
functionalitywise, but it feels high
craft and worth paying for. I think
these apps are the anti-AI slop. They
feel valuable to pay for. They're
enjoyable to use. And when I talked to
the designers behind these apps and the
highest craft designers I know, they
didn't make their work with any set
process, let alone like the design process.
process.
So I think the reality is there aren't
these great there aren't steps in the
design process that encourage great craft.
craft.
It's just like not the right process for
this and it never really compensated in
a way that helped you in do great craft.
And finally, every project is just so
different and the range of projects that
we're working on is changing too. The
design process was like selling you
something like this, like a format, a
step-by-step thing where you can worship
and it said like every day you do this
and it'll even insold you like entire
degrees in ways to do the design process.
process.
But then I think what ended up happening
to us is that it made people worship
this process and spend a lot of time on
these process artifacts, not the end
result. I see this in portfolios all the
time where there's like 80% process
artifacts and you can tell they spent so
much time on these things and then like
there's one screen at the very end that
is like just it's like here's the end experience.
experience.
The design process taught us like follow
these steps in this like very rigid
order in this you know in these with
these arrows.
But I think the reality is like the user
doesn't give a about the process
artifacts you made or whether you made
the perfect user journey. They care
about the end experience that they're
feeling and seeing.
And every project is just so different.
You know, every project has different
stakeholders, complexity, problem space,
unknowns, technical constraints,
timelines, business needs, staffing,
etc. There's just no way that the same
set of steps works across all of these
different companies.
You just can't produce great work this
way. Like, it just doesn't produce
better work. And you can't repeat this
process for every single project.
But oddly enough, the sentiment in the
industry in the W was wall has been, you
know, trust the process, follow the
steps, have a rigorous design process,
and you're doing your job really well.
Well, I'm here to say, don't trust the
process. It just doesn't really make
sense, especially in this new era. And
I'm sorry if this is a process you love,
trust, rely on, or is mandated by your
job, but honestly, it's my policy here.
This is going to be uncomfortable, but I
think discomfort is what is warranted to
help us shepherd in this new era.
I get how we got here though. You know,
in the early 2000s, we were doing this
sort of work, which was gorgeous, but we
were pivoting from graphic design and
web design into designing full fully
experienced apps and and in things where
people were on their mobile phones and
had to consider all the environment
around them. And we were just seen as
these people who just come in and like
make things pretty.
But there's this whole movement, you
know, design needed to see at the table.
We needed to have legitimacy. We needed
also to design for more complex
experiences. And we weren't just
designing a simple, you know,
step-by-step web page anymore, but we
were designing for like complex mobile apps.
apps.
So then there's this this explosion in
the idea of design thinking and
usercentric design generally I think all
good things because we considered not
just how things looked but how they
felt, how they worked, how they could
impact the day-to-day of someone's lives
and their impact on the business as
well. But because of that, I think we
tilted the balances a lot. you know,
where we prioritize strategy way over
craft to the extent that our overall
craft suffered.
And so now I think we need to retip the
balances a little bit more, make sure
our job balances both strategy and
craft. But we also have to untangle this
like hairball of mess of like these new
factors that are in our world right now.
Things like, you know, lower barriers to
design, all this exponential change from
AI, role shifting, less headcount craft,
and new tools. Oh, there goes the slide.
But these things are changing maybe
faster than they have been in the last
10 to 15 years.
So for our sake, we cannot trust the old
process anymore. But but even before
this, I think I was already not trusting
this process. And that's partly because
in the last few years, the work of
designers that I've seen in the
industry, like I've just just grown
increasingly skeptical of this the
ability of the process to create great work.
work.
Most of the time when I think about the
work that I'm proudest of or most in awe
of, they're usually not using this
process or anything close to it. The
best work that I've seen is it's
starting from solution first, not a
problem. Actually, a solution that
everyone gravitates towards and makes
everybody say, "Wow."
It's when a team cares so much they
spend a lot of time iterating on the
details and just trying to get them
right. Or when a designer has strong
intuition or conviction. Maybe it's not
something that everyone agrees with off
the bat or doesn't show up directly in a
user research study. It's when a
designer skips steps or when they make
them up to get what they need or when a
team does something to just make people
smile. Not because it came up in a
persona or a user journey, but because
they wanted to make people smile.
So, let's start with this one and break
it down a bit. Starting from solution
first. For some reason with the design
process, this felt super illegal and you
just like couldn't do it or you're a bad designer.
