tw-rl

I've been having a lot of thoughts about the state of product and UX design lately and I need to vent for a minute.

I think the practice has lost a lot in the process of trying to legitimize design in the eyes of others. Design thinking was fundamentally a way of selling design-as-science to business folks. "Don't worry, it's not just nebulous 'creativity', we've got a system!"

Those processes aren't wrong, but they're all just tools in your toolbox. I meet so many young designers who have been taught design process as gospel and don't know how to operate outside of that. They can't generate ideas without validation. They don't trust their instincts.

Some of the best products I've seen or worked on were wild ideas, created from strong gut instincts by creative people. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't, but the current state of product design explicitly shuts down that kind of thinking.

Of course, it's all a balance. Design process, user research, structured iteration are all incredibly valuable. I'm not suggesting we abandon them. We've just over-indexed on what's measurable, & we don't talk about the equivalent value of fuzzier things like creativity and taste

So I've been thinking about how we find a more balanced practice, how we train designers, and how to advocate for things like gut feel in orgs that have become hyper-quantified. (One of the things I love about working with @ev is that he fundamentally gets all of this.)