There are a lot of Big Important Designer folks who’s give talks on the design process in an organisation.
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There are a lot of Big Important Designer folks who give talks on the design process in an organisation.
Almost always they put up a slide with some linear process that starts with discovery, goes into refinement, then production, then shipping… and how that’s not ‘how it works’.
Then they put up a slide that has a messy squiggly line that goes everywhere through these phases. And you’re all supposed to nod, like ‘this is real’. But it’s not.
Modern design is more like this:
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The discovery process, which used to be owned by Design, is almost entirely dead. Instead it’s made up from the arses of a handful of execs who have an agenda they want to push through.
It’s mostly reactive in nature, and it’s mostly driven by what the competition is doing, and NOT user need. By the time Design hears about it, it’s a done deal, and they have a week to make comps so engineers don’t slow down.
Remember, agile sprints are a game now. The game is to make the number go up.
3/x
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You can’t ‘innovate’ when you’re given neither time, nor resources. Granted, not everything has to be innovative!
However, discovering what the problem ACTUALLY is, is important. Because no real discovery has been done, the underlying WHY has never been discovered…
2/x
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So you wind up designing a thing based on assumption. At worse case, the assumption is entirely wrong, and you have a public disaster. But mostly, the assumption is ‘directionally plausible’.
This leads to a huge amount of resources being spent on ‘meh’. AKA, something that has a value of more than 0, but very far away from actually satisfying the need.
These decisions are made hundreds of times throughout the year, each ‘meh’ decision compounding the prior ‘meh’. An avalanche of ‘meh’.
4/x
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This problem is exasperated by the recent swing to focus on hiring mid-level designers, then putting them under Product(project) Managers.
They have juuuuust enough skill to do what they’re told, but not enough time in the field nor tenure to ask hard questions, or come up with more elegant alternatives to what is stated on the Jira ticket.
5/x
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Of course even if they did ask the hard questions, they’re unlikely to get an answer because that is going to make the Big Important Number go down, due to the time it takes to find the answer.
So in the end, the designer looks at what everybody else is doing (which is copying everyone else, who are really copying Google, mostly).
The Cycle of Meh continues. Each generational copy slightly shittier than the prior generational copy, but providing juuuuust enough value to mitigate churn.
6/x
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@octothorpe Innovation is a bad goal usually put forward by a bad (and surprisingly not usually merely ignorant but actually morally bad) person). The moment it, by name, makes a list that survives even one culling down because the advocate has power the project is doomed to mediocrity at best.
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@jon_alper to clarify, I wasn’t suggesting ‘innovation’ be a goal. It is however something that can occur given the proper environment (ie, time and resources).
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@octothorpe Oh I totally got that! I’m sorry, what I meant to do was ‘add one more’ onto the problems you described. Perhaps when you hear that as a goal, it’s a sign the rest you mentioned is coming.
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@jon_alper yuuuuuup
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@octothorpe your truth, it is so spot on it hurts.
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@matt I mean, it’s hard not to see if you’ve been around the block a few times, eh?