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Jenny Wen — Don't trust the (design) process

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For a good period of time, between like, 2014–2020, design was all about The Process. You know it. Yeah, that’s the one: Instead of portfolios of mockups or prototypes, it was all these artifacts — journeys, flows, personas, user stories. Proof of the process. And our output started looking more like this: We stopped caring so much about the actual design of the thing — what people actually saw or felt when they used the thing we made. And we self-indulged in all the “practice of design”. And, I get why we did this! Ten or fifteen years ago, most designers were traditionally graphic designers and a lot of early software design focused on just making something pretty and shiny. But, designing software was complex — you had a real human being on the other side, interacting with a complex system in a multitude of ways you couldn’t anticipate. All of sudden, we weren’t just designing something visual, but we needed to understand human behaviour, to see ourselves in other people’s contexts

Jenny Wen — Notes June 30, 2024 Don't trust the (design) process For a good period of time, between like, 2014–2020, design was all about The Process. You know it. Yeah, that’s the one: Instead of portfolios of mockups or prototypes, it was all these artifacts — journeys, flows, personas, user stories. Proof of the process. And our output started looking more like this: We stopped caring so much about the actual design of the thing — what people actually saw or felt when they used the thing we made. And we self-indulged in all the “practice of design”. And, I get why we did this! Ten or fiftee

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