Don’t trust the design process 💡

Summary

Dive Club 🤿 Episode Summary: "Don’t Trust the Design Process 💡"

Host: Ridd
Guest(s): Gabe Valdivia, Dennis (Founder of Amy), Nicholas Klein (Lead Designer at Figma), Michael Wandemeyer (Metalab), Jenny Wen
Release Date: December 16, 2024

---

Introduction

In the episode titled "Don’t Trust the Design Process 💡," host Ridd delves deep into the intricacies of the design workflow, challenging conventional methodologies and advocating for a more flexible, speed-oriented approach. Through insightful conversations with leading designers and industry experts, the episode explores how redefining the design process can lead to more authentic and effective outcomes.

---

Redefining Fidelity in the Design Process

Gabe Valdivia initiates the discussion by addressing a common designer's dilemma: the guilt associated with bypassing traditional steps to jump directly into high-fidelity designs.

“For a long time, I felt guilty when I jumped straight to high fidelity, like I was being a bad designer by skipping a necessary part of the process.”
— Gabe Valdivia [00:00]

Dennis, the founder of Amy, counters this by emphasizing the importance of speed over strictly adhering to fidelity levels. He argues that sharing updates frequently is crucial, even if it means presenting lower-fidelity artifacts initially.

“You should be able to share an update on the work every day, every other day, definitely every week. So if it takes you two weeks to come back with a prototype that's too slow, like, you should have shared napkin sketch.”
— Dennis [00:11]

Gabe resonates with Dennis's perspective, highlighting the refreshing shift from fidelity being tied to the design process to being anchored in speed.

“It's so common to hear designers talk about fidelity levels based on where they're at in the design process. That's why it's so refreshing to hear Gabe anchor on speed.”
— Gabe Valdivia [00:23]

---

Speed vs. Quality in Prototyping

Dennis further elaborates on the balance between speed and fidelity, advocating for higher fidelity creations only when one has achieved sufficient speed in their workflow.

“You can give yourself the luxury of creating a higher fidelity prototype or artifact if you have become fast enough to do that. If not, then give me a wireframe, right?”
— Dennis [00:32]

He underscores the necessity of frequent interactions and iterations to keep stakeholders engaged and informed.

“I need to be reacting to something often and bringing people along with me often. Otherwise, I'm not ready to focus on origami prototypes.”
— Dennis [00:32]

Gabe introduces Dennis's collaboration with design engineer Stefan, illustrating how prototyping can be both high and low fidelity based on the time and resources available.

“This can be a gray box prototype, like a gray box mockup, Just layout. Where do things go? It can be a little bit more high fidelity... whatever you can get done in half a day.”
— Gabe Valdivia [01:07]

---

Stakeholder Engagement and Reactions

A pivotal point raised is how the fidelity of prototypes influences stakeholder perceptions and feedback. Higher fidelity prototypes can sometimes divert attention to non-essential details, while lower fidelity ones might lead to underestimating potential issues.

“I like this idea from Gavin Nelson where he talks about his experience designing the linear mobile app. Even in the early stages... the higher fidelity prototype is exponentially more useful.”
— Gabe Valdivia [02:07]

Gabe emphasizes the importance of prototypes that can elicit genuine reactions, facilitating meaningful iterations and improvements.

---

Defining Fidelity in Prototyping

Nicholas Klein, leading the design of prototyping features in Figma, provides a nuanced perspective on fidelity. He differentiates between "story" fidelities, which are akin to presentations with predefined interaction paths, and "multipath" fidelities, which allow for user-driven interactions and unpredictable feedback.

“If you know the story of what you want to tell... it's closer to you building a presentation than to building a quote unquote prototype.”
— Nicholas Klein [03:02]

He further explains the necessity of multipath fidelities in capturing authentic user behaviors and preferences.

“You need to somehow find a way that this thing feels real... you need a multipath level of fidelity.”
— Nicholas Klein [03:02]

---

Expert Perspectives: Industry Leaders' Insights

Michael Wandemeyer from Metalab shares his team's approach to initiating projects, emphasizing the freedom to explore high-fidelity designs without being constrained by strict requirements. This openness fosters innovative thinking and challenges preconceived notions of feasibility.

“They give designers ultimate freedom... just envision in high fidelity the most natural way to express yourself concepts for what the product might be.”
— Michael Wandemeyer [06:38]

He notes that such freedom often leads to groundbreaking ideas that transcend conservative or pragmatic solutions.

---

Challenging Traditional Design Processes

Jenny Wen, who played a pivotal role in building FigJam, discusses her team's iterative approach involving close collaboration with engineers. She highlights the importance of viewing engineering as an integral part of the design iteration process rather than separate or disposable.

“We see engineering as a part of the process of iterating and refining... it's not a waste of time. It sort of moves the project forward and it's a part of the design process now.”
— Jenny Wen [07:21]

Gabe references Jenny's impactful article, "Don't Trust the Design Process," summarizing her arguments against rigid adherence to traditional design methodologies. Jenny critiques the overemphasis on procedural artifacts over actual design outcomes, advocating for a more fluid and intuitive approach.

“We spent so much time trying to decode our users in so many ways... We became servants to the process, following it step by step, every single time.”
— Jenny Wen (Excerpt from her article [07:52])

She concludes by championing a messy, flexible process that prioritizes creativity and genuine user-centric outcomes over strict procedural adherence.

“It's messy and I wouldn't have it any other way.”
— Jenny Wen (Excerpt from her article [07:52])

---

Conclusions and Final Thoughts

The episode underscores a critical shift in the design landscape: moving away from rigid, process-driven methodologies towards a more dynamic, speed-oriented approach that values genuine interaction and iterative feedback. By redefining fidelity as a function of speed and embracing flexibility, designers can produce more authentic and effective solutions that truly resonate with users.

Ridd wraps up the episode by reiterating the importance of challenging traditional processes and encourages designers to adopt more intuitive and adaptable workflows to unlock their full creative potential.

---

Notable Quotes

• Gabe Valdivia [00:00]: “For a long time, I felt guilty when I jumped straight to high fidelity, like I was being a bad designer by skipping a necessary part of the process.”

• Dennis [00:11]: “You should be able to share an update on the work every day, every other day, definitely every week...”

• Nicholas Klein [03:02]: “...you need to somehow find a way that this thing feels real...”

• Jenny Wen [07:52]: “We became servants to the process, following it step by step, every single time.”

---

Final Takeaway

"Don’t Trust the Design Process 💡" challenges designers to rethink their workflows, prioritize speed and adaptability, and focus on creating genuine, user-centric designs over adhering strictly to traditional processes. By embracing flexibility and redefining key aspects like fidelity, designers can foster innovation and produce more impactful work.

---

For more insights and detailed discussions, visit Dive.club and subscribe to the Dive Club newsletter for weekly updates and bonus resources.

Transcript

[Gabe Valdivia]

For a long time, I felt guilty when I jumped straight to high fidelity, like I was being a bad designer by skipping a necessary part of the process. And that's why this idea from Gabe Valdivia really stuck with me.

[Dennis]

You should be able to share an update on the work every day, every other day, definitely every week. So if it takes you two weeks to come back with a prototype that's too slow, like, you should have shared napkin sketch.

[Gabe Valdivia]

It's so common to hear designers talk about fidelity levels based on where they're at in the design process. That's why it's so refreshing to hear Gabe anchor on speed.

[Dennis]

You can give yourself the luxury of creating a higher fidelity prototype or artifact if you have become fast enough to do that. If not, then give me a wireframe, right? Like, I need to be reacting to something often and bringing people along with me often. Otherwise, I'm not ready to focus on origami prototypes. I'm just not fast enough. I'm not ready. I got to go back to practicing on my own until I'm ready to bring that to my professional world.

[Gabe Valdivia]

So that.

[Dennis]

That to me is like the cost of doing something high fidelity. If I can make a perfect prototype, you know, within 30 minutes, I do that. That's the goal.

[Gabe Valdivia]

This mental model where fidelity is a function of speed came up when Dennis, the founder of Amy, was describing how he collaborates with their design engineer, Stefan. It can be a gray box prototype, like a gray box mockup, Just layout. Where do things go? It can be a little bit more high fidelity, but, like, overall, it's, you know, whatever you can get done in half a day. That is the fidelity. Too many designers view high fidelity as the thing that you work toward as you narrow in on your ideas. Almost like you don't want to make too many high fidelity explorations because it's wasteful. But I think that's why we can learn a lot from the early Facebook culture.

[Dennis]

I think that's where the Facebook upbringing comes in, where there was a lot of work being done there to create really high fidelity prototypes really quickly, valid ideas. So I think that paired up with that artifact first mentality allows us to get out of the abstract land of like, should we do this, should we do that? Let's do this and that, and let's do both at a high fidelity. And then react.

[Gabe Valdivia]

I'm going to underline the word react because I don't know about you, but I've been told this story where when we show designs that are higher fidelity, it's easier for stakeholders to get distracted and hung up on things that don't matter. And there's definitely some truth to that. But I think it's also easy to ignore something that just feels a little bit off because it's lower fidelity, almost trusting that it'll get ironed out later in the process. And that's why I like this idea from Gavin Nelson where he talks about his experience designing the linear mobile app. Even in the early stages, when you're trying to prototype an interaction and just quickly validate a decision, the higher fidelity.

[Dennis]

A prototype is in some ways the.

[Gabe Valdivia]

Exponentially more useful it becomes. Now, before we go further, I do want to pause and define our terms just a little bit here, because there are different types of high fidelity prototypes. So let's take a second to hear from Nicholas Klein, who is leading the design of the prototyping features in figma.

[Nicholas Klein]

When you're demoing a prototype to any use case, to a developer, to designers, to stakeholders in a product review, if you know the story of what you want to tell, then it's closer to you building a presentation than to building a quote unquote prototype. And it still is a prototype, I would say, right? But you know exactly where to click. And there's this other part where somebody else opens this thing and you want to see what they do, what they play with, what they actually feel. And you need to somehow find a way that this thing feels real, that this fourth wall in a way is kept up at that moment you get the realistic responses back to them. And for those cases, compared to those single path level of fidelity, you essentially need a multipath level of fidelity because you don't know yet which direction the user is going to pick because that's exactly the thing you want to test. So comparing it to the story kinds of fidelities and the multipath kinds of fidelities, where you want to test which path users end up going into and which path users end up being stuck. I would say that like if you land on something on the ladder side, learning how variables work, how variant binding works, and how it can help you set up those prototypes more efficiently is definitely helpful.

[Gabe Valdivia]

Real quick message and then we can jump back into it. It for years I've been paying for third party website analytics, but I can finally cancel those subscriptions because Framer just released their all new analytics dashboard. It's built into every plan and it's even fully GDPR compliant without the need for a cookie banner. That way you can get a complete breakdown of how your site is performing, including live visitor activity bounce rates. You can see breakdowns by country device and even get a glimpse into refers and ut. You can then filter data automatically by clicking on any of the individual metrics. Like users on a desktop who found your site through Google, it's super powerful, but most importantly it's built directly into your dashboard so you can't beat that. It's just another reason why I tell everyone to use Framer for their next website and you can start using it today. Just head to Dive Club Framer There is so much more to good design than what it looks like. It's also how it feels, feels and functions. And look, I can accomplish a lot in Figma, but there's still a ceiling there. Which is why I'm so excited about Play 2.0. It allows you to create ultra realistic prototypes because for the first time you can design interactions with native iOS gestures and Apple's core animation. So your prototypes feel real because they are real. Which is why so many of the best designers that I know are all using Play to design and prototype their mobile apps. So if you want to join them, head to Dive Club Slash Play to get started today. Okay, now onto the episode. Now I've taught advanced prototyping to literally thousands of designers through Figma Academy and you can accomplish some really powerful stuff. But there's a trend that I notice where designers by default want to make the most functional prototype possible at all times. But that's really only valuable when you need a multi path prototype and you're trying to keep up this fourth wall. As Nico talks about otherw, it becomes really low ROI pretty quickly. So I don't want that to be your takeaway because sometimes it's just about imagining the future and casting vision. And in that world high fidelity is often a more natural way to explore outside of the realm of the obvious solutions. Here's Michael Wandemeyer sharing how Metalab likes.

[Michael Wandemeyer]

To start their projects to give designers ultimate freedom in a first couple of days to be unconstrained by requirements or even like a hard specific goal and just envision in high fidelity the most natural way to express yourself concepts for what the product might be. And the funny thing is that that changes dramatically the conversation around what we think is possible. Often the perceived barriers to doing something really cool are mostly in your mind and you self censor and do more conservative or pragmatic solutions.

[Gabe Valdivia]

And a lot of times the way to uncap these early explorations and really figure out what is possible is to Start exploring in code too. Here's Jenny Wen sharing about the process of building figjam.

[Jenny Wen]

We actually usually have engineers work closely and they sort of build out this first version and they build the first version out with sort of this expectation that, you know, it might actually change. This isn't like the final thing. And we actually see engineering as a part of the process of iterating and refining and whatnot. And I think at a lot of other teams the norm is that, you know, if it gets built and it changes, it's sort of like throw away work and it's a waste of time. But we actually see that as it's not a waste of time. It sort of moves the project forward and it's a part of the design process now.

[Gabe Valdivia]

Speaking of Jenny, she wrote one of my favorite articles of 2024 called Don't Trust the Design Process. And I share it pretty much all the time. I'll include it in the show notes so you can find it for yourself. But I want to end this episode by taking just a couple minutes to read it to you today because I think that it's something that every designer should hear. She says. For a good period of time between like 2014 to 2020, design was all about the process. Instead of portfolio portfolios or mock ups 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 that we made. And we self indulged in all of the practice of design. And I get why we did this 10 or 15 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 a sudden we weren't just designing something visual, but we needed to understand human behavior, to see ourselves in other people's context. Don't get me started on our empathy phase. To learn how the decisions we made could affect a company's bottom line, etc. But along the way, we lost something. The actual work we were producing. We spent so much time trying to decode our users in so many ways. A Persona, then a journey, then a user flow, then a lo fi wireframe, then a concept test. We focused on it so much that we deemed the pixels unserious and unimportant. We stopped doing the real thing. That would be the most empathetic and that would actually serve business outcomes, building stuff that worked well and that people would love. We became servants to the process, following it step by step, every single time, saying stuff like trust the process. We made designers feel like their work wasn't complete if they didn't start from a perfectly articulated problem statement. The way I've seen great work made isn't using any sort of design process. It's skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It's doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It's backtracking when we're unsatisfied. It's changing things after we've handed off the design. It's starting from the solution first. It's operating on vibes and intuition. It's making something just for the sake of making people smile. It's a feeling that we nailed it. It's knowing how to bend the process in your favor. It's the sense to know how to keep making your work better. And it's a clear, unwavering ideal of what good looks like. It's messy and I wouldn't have it any other way. Hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I did. And again, I'll include the link in the show notes so you can save it for yourself. It's a good example of the type of resources that I like to share in the Dive Club newsletter. If you're not getting those emails, I definitely recommend heading to Dive Club email to sign up and I will see you next week. Hey, it's Rid. Don't forget if you want to go even deeper. Each week I send an email out to over 10,000 designers with bonus resources and key takeaways from these conversations. So head to Dive Club email to sign up. Okay, I'll see you next week.