The Broken Design Process: Shifting from Destination to Iterative Thinking
Design, often misunderstood as a final destination, is actually a continuous process. Good design emerges when we can think visually, lay out ideas and content, visualize our concepts, and refine them. While tools like Figma and other collaborative design platforms have made progress, they still fall short of our needs.
Figma, for instance, serves as a design “finishing” tool and supports iteration in theory. But the type of iteration you can do in Figma is very narrow. You can iterate on design aesthetics and some specific aspects of layout and functionality, but you wouldn’t want to challenge core requirement assumptions in Figma, or test vastly different content organization systems or user experiences.
On the other hand, brainstorming tools like Miro help us plan and visualize ideas early in the process, but are too unstructured to allow for meaningful design iteration. Miro is a great place to brainstorm, but is not a great place for organizing the layout and content of design.
What we truly need is a new breed of tool—a tool specifically designed for rapid iteration. This tool should:
- Be visual, so teams can see the layout of the design.
- Focused on the core elements of structure, content, and functionality, so teams can ideate and test against these.
- Strike the right balance of structure and freedom in how the design iteration is built, so it’s easy to think creatively, but the process of assembling the iteration is fast.
- Have an interface that fits the creative process of a diverse range of contributors, not just designers.
- Be user-friendly and easy to learn, so anyone can quickly join the process and contribute.
- Feature functionality that enables a live preview of the layout, mimicking an actual website, so teams can test user-flow and functionality assumptions.
While prototyping and wireframing tools exist, many popular options miss the mark. Wireframing and prototyping is generally considered a design activity only, and the tools are built that way. They are not user-friendly for non-designers, and they are focused on moving the process forward, incrementally, towards a final design.
The key mistake lies in combining structured visual thinking with aesthetics prematurely. Functionality and aesthetics should be approached separately, and only later combined. A wealth of tools already exists to brainstorm and iterate on aesthetic choices, and these components play a vital role in the process. However, it is crucial to separate such thinking from the visual layout and design requirement considerations.
A rapid iteration tool is the place to ideate, to develop design layout ideas related to usability, structure, and content, and a place to test and iterate on those ideas. It should be built for speed. It should also be a tool that can be used at any stage of the process – including to make minor or major changes after a design goes live.
By embracing a new type of tool—one that prioritizes rapid iteration, offers visual layout capabilities, and fosters collaboration—we can revolutionize the design process. Let us shift our mindset from design as a final destination to design as an iterative journey, where ideas can evolve, stakeholders can contribute, and remarkable designs can flourish.
