The traditional, rigid design process is outdated and no longer effective in the current era of rapid technological advancement (especially AI), evolving roles, and resource constraints; designers must instead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.
designer.
But one example is when the team at
Enthropic, this predated me when they
created claude artifacts where artifacts
are basically this right panel that is
showing you like the interactive code.
Basically, this was they were the team
was the first kind of like AI team to
actually create this pattern, but it's
used across like all these different AI
apps now. And it basically generates
code instantly and lets you interact
with it right there.
This was a prototype that one of the
researchers on the team built and it you
know it doesn't look awesome but it
basically when Claude was generating
code it would create this interactive
artifact on the side and it was just
really kind of like interesting to see
but one of the designers on the team
Michael he saw this and he was like I
love this and he iterated on it and
built his own prototype and the
reactions across the team were just so
positive and they just felt like there
was something there. It didn't come from
a pro product problem statement. Uh but
but when we launched it, it was really
successful. It was just this thing that
finally made people realize like, oh
like AI is not just writing code,
but it's like creating these interactive
applications that I can use. I think it
fundamentally changed the way that
people perceived AI. And if we I think
if we started problem statement first,
we maybe would have never gotten here.
We didn't know that it was a problem
worth solving until we actually saw the solution.
solution.
And this used to happen mostly on teams
with like really good prototypers, but
with all these new tools, I think it's
starting to happen all the time. And not
just with designers either. It's
starting to be the expectation.
But this feels sort of illegal in the
old design process, right?
But I think what we're seeing more and
more now, especially if you're working
with AI or products that are built on
top of AI, which I think more and more
of us probably are over time, we have
this like new technology. It's like
pretty drastically different than
anything we've ever seen. It's new. We
sort of know what it's good at.
But since it's new, we have all these
existing problems that we've solved
before without AI. And we basically have
to look at all of them and see and say
like, hey, how do we actually take this
technology that's new and apply it
backwards to all these problems? Like
how can we solve these problems in a
different way? I think this is like
fundamentally different in than the last
era because the technology was
relatively static. We didn't have
anything that like changed the game for
us this much. And that and because of
that, we had to look for problems to
solve instead of solutions to have.
And we ba we basically at at Enthropic
do this every time the model gets
better. We see what it's capable of and
what it's good at and we have to figure
out like, hey, what problems could it
solve to help people? So, for example,
in the last year or so, the cloud model
has gotten better at a bunch of these
things. You know, it's gotten larger
context windows, a better ability to use
tools, it's able to orchestrate agents,
it's able to plan and do multi-step reasoning.
reasoning.
And all those capabilities made it
possible for us to launch a research
feature earlier this year where Claude
can basically go off for 10, 20 minutes
at a time and write you this full-on
research report, which is like kind of a
marvel, right? It's basically deploying
these like sub agents to do different
parts of this, slowing down to think
about what to write, as opposed to
before when AI would just like spit out
an answer instantaneously and not think
that hard about it. But this is all
because the technology got us there first.
first.
So it's okay to do things out of order,
especially in this AI era where the
technology is changing faster than ever.
I think it changes the process that we
need to use.
Another way that I've seen really great
work made is when the team just like
cares ruthlessly about the details. So
for example, we launched Big Jam in 2021
and we launched it and it worked pretty
well, but after the launch, we weren't
just like adding new features to it. We
just continued to iterate on it and make
the quality better.
So, we spent a large percentage of the
time in the years that followed just
iterating on details, making sure the
core mechanics of the product actually
felt good. We iterated on snapping and
and alignments. We changed the way that
we showed selection borders on canvas to
feel less noisy. We iterated on the
colors a bunch just to make sure we were
we got the right range and we the colors
weren't too loud. We added a bunch of
ways to change the font size and adjust
them. We gave images a border so that
way they'd stand up stand out on canvas.
We iterated a bunch on how shapes would
overflow as you were typing. We tweaked
and refined a bunch of the toolbar
interactions and so so many more. Like I
could probably fill a full talk slot
just like talking about the iterations
that we made over time. But the actual
process for this was like not the
standard design process. It was like
more like this where you're just
continuing to do a long tale of quality
and iterations endlessly. It's not
something this like double diamond thing
just really makes room for. We're always
just trying to learn and iterate and
make things better.
They take time, you know, like they take
concerted time. They're not accommodated
for the design process. It's just
something that you have to care about
and you have to a lot time for.
Okay. Another way that I've seen great
work made is just operating on
intuition. I think this is like one of
my favorites because I love intuition.
And I think intuition is just like a
dirty word for designers. Like it's it's
like you're not being userentric enough.
You don't care. You're not dataentric
enough. That's that's not legit if
you're just using your intuition.
But intuition is not guessing. It's I
think people think it's like vibes or
guessing or whoever has the best
argument, but I actually think intuition
is incredibly valuable and it's actually
incredibly rare. It's something you have
to build.
I think intuition is the ability to make
reason judgments quickly. It's a
shortcut to thinking really long and
hard or having to gather evidence
because you know the subject area so
deeply and in such an expert way. I
think having great intuition is
something to be respected and to really
aspire to. It's I don't think we should
be looking down on it. like I think we
should be trying to build it. I think
these are some of the ways that I have
been trying to build mine. I just build
it by like constantly reading feedback
of the about the product whether that's
in Twitter or Reddit or wherever you you
know you find feedback about your
product. It's sometimes internal
feedback boards. I think your sales team
might be collecting it a lot too. So
talk to them. I make sure I go to user
research sessions regularly. I watch
back old ones. I read old reports. I
will go to user research sessions that
are not about my part of the product
just because I'm learning more about our
user base. I'm looking at dashboards
regularly. I just like see what the
trends are on overall usage and activity.
activity.
I'm also drawing on things that are like
these cognitive biases and design
principles that you learn in like a
textbook from school and psychology
because I think these things are just
like helping you predict how people
behave and make decisions overall. But
what I'm doing here I think really is
like building my internal model of the
world of our users and our end product.
So that way I don't have to research
every single decision or AB test every
single decision. I'm trying to make
educated guesses to move quickly. But
also I think it creates better design
work because you can now apply this
intuition not towards just like big
product decisions but as well as like
smaller ones like oh how do I group
these buttons together or like what do I
show on this like login page
because intuition is not guessing.
building a great intuition. Like that is
what is going to make you a great
designer because you're going to wield
this intuition for decisions of all
sizes and scales like picking the right
design pattern for defending a a design
or making a snap choice. That's like
something you can't really pay for get
AI to generate.
The next way that I've seen great work
made is skipping steps and making them
up. Also a favorite of mine. So you
probably know the Google Ventures design
sprint. it's like pretty rigid and they
stay they're like really adamant about
how every step really matters. You can't
you know there's reasons that they're
there and I've run this sprint a bunch
of times but honestly like most of the
time I'm like these steps don't really
matter to me right now and they don't
feel useful and I think especially if
you're at a startup like a whole week is
such a long time like that's like a year
in startup time. So over the years I've
run a bunch of different variants of it
where I mix the steps remove them etc.
And this is like one of my favorite ways
to do it where I just spend most of the
time prototyping and ideulating because
I find that prototypes are the thing
that that like when you produce them out
of the sprint, people really see them
and they really understand the concept.
So I also do it in three days as opposed
to five. And I think this is the thing
that's worked for me and the teams I've
been on, but I try to play with it every
time and maybe something else works
better for you and your team.
Another process thing is the working
backwards Amazon thing where you write a
press release to imagine how a reporter
would write about your feature. And I
like the goal of this, but it felt
static and not relevant to us when we're
using this at Figma. So I thought, how
do I actually make this work for us? And
so I think the Figma equivalent is the
tweet, you know, because we always like
would talk to our users a bunch and we
would communicate with them through
there. And so I made this component one
time for a brainstorm where instead of a
press release, I got them to imagine
like, hey, how would someone react on
Twitter to this feature?
And this is the component in use
actually for a bunch of big jam features
that we built like cursor chat,
handshakes, emotes, and stamps. And you
can actually see the first sketches of
those features here. And when we
actually did launch the product, we saw
tweets that resembled these, which was
really cool to see because it meant that
these features that we built actually
evoked the emotions that we wanted them to.
to.
And something similar I also tried doing
is uh writing and making fake landing
page headlines to imagine how we might
might package features together and
brainstorm those features. This is
another riff on the on the press release
that felt faster and like more relevant
to us at Figma. I love just trying to
figure out every time like what steps
make the most sense for my team and to
get the best results. It's actually like
weirdly fun to me because I sort of
think about the existing design process
as like this like set of instructions
that you get from IKEA furniture that's
like kind of hard to decipher. Um, and
it's just the same steps. You follow
them every time and you're supposed to
get an outcome, right? But the thing is,
when you're designing something, it's
kind of different. Like, you actually
don't know what the end outcome is.
Like, you don't know if it's going to be
this Billy bookshelf.
It could also be a chair or a lamp or
even like a hot dog. Like, you just you
start the process and you actually don't
know what you're trying to get at the
very end, unlike IKEA furniture. So, if
you don't know what you're building, how
do you know what the steps are, right?
like how can you use the same steps to
get to that that result every time? So
every time you have to both chart the
chart the map and define what the thing
is that you're building that seems hard,
right? Like there's there's no manual.
So here's where that dirty word
intuition comes into play again. You
have to use another part of your
intuition in this new world to know how
to get through a project. No one's going
to hand you this manual that's going to
solve all your problems.
So your value as a designer is in honing
that process to get to the best results,
not following one. If anyone if you
could follow a process, then like anyone
could do it.
Finally, the last way that I've seen
great work made is doing something just
for the sake of making people smile.
So if you've ever played with these
features in Pig Jam, the stamps, the
emotes, the the cursor chat, they're
some of my favorite things that I've
ever built I've built in my career ever.
But part of our process for them
honestly was just prototyping them in
real code, trying them out in our
internal builds. And we just like show
up to people's meetings and ask them to
try them out. Like these are actual
recordings of people trying them out in
meetings uh with the prototypes. And
even as we were prototyping them, there
was like a ton of usability issues and
things wrong with them. But we noticed
that people were smiling, laughing, and
they transformed them from the beginning
of the meeting. And so we knew there was
something good there and that we had to
keep going.
And ultimately when we launched these
features, they set the precedence for a
ton of other features on Fig Jam, but
also at Figma generally. The goal became
to just like make people smile and we
just added details that would be
delightful. And that was some of like
the work that everyone was most proud of
there. I think these didn't come from a
problem statement. There's no step in
the process for them. They just came
from a team of design designers and
engineers that cared very deeply.
So there's a list of things I mentioned.
Everyone loves a summary slide. Uh but
unlike the design process, these aren't
hard and fast rules. You shouldn't
probably shouldn't do all of them in
anything. You don't need to do them in
order. They don't guarantee good work
even. And there are probably also a ton
of other things that I've missed. Like
you've probably done great other things
on your teams that have created great
work that I don't have on the here.
So I hope I've shown you this old adage
like trust the process. I think that's
dead in this new era. We can't really
trust the process anymore. And
personally, I don't ever think we really
could have trusted it. But in this era,
Our roles are changing. The tools that
we're using are changing, but at the
same time, the design process that's
dictated to us is the same. You know,
our value isn't in repeating a process.
If it was, anybody could be a designer.
We're rewriting the process right now.
This is like pretty scary because we
don't have precedent to follow. But I
don't know about you, it's like sort of
fun for me. We need to both figure out
what we're building and the map to
getting there every single time. But our
power is in wielding the right tools in
mixing and matching and creating great
results no matter how we got there. So
we can't trust the process. If we want
to both survive and thrive through this
era, we have to do something scarier,
bolder, but at the same time more
exhilarating. Think
we have to trust ourselves again as
designers, as practitioners, as people
with experience and a valuable skill
set. We have to trust ourselves to try
new things, to wield the right tools, to
feel and know when we've designed
something or built something great. It's
the most empowering, but also probably
one of the most vulnerable things we can
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