Thinking about design process: simple or complex?

In its most generic form, design refers to a plan for the construction of an object or a system. As such, it often requires disciplined set of steps, often called design process. It’s initial idea and purpose is to provide well established framework, foundations for design-related work. But often, design process can be too complex and harmful.Design process, yes, but…

Design process, yes, but…

There is no simple answer to this question, but just by looking all over the web, there seems that there is not such a thing as a simple design process. If you search the web for “design process” or “design process steps” rarely you’ll find any with less than 7 steps.

I do understand the idea and, of course, the need for design process – ideally, it’s here to help both us, design agencies, experience designers and our clients and customers – and, of course, users. However, I’m not always sure that companies decide to implement design process based on those principles.

I remember the stories about design processes at one of my former companies where the management was really into design process “because it will make us look seriously in the eyes of competitors, clients and users”. And there were bunch of steps in the process, there was a nice acronym to make the process look and appeal more “cool” but was there really a need?

In reality, many projects have never actually followed the process. And that’s OK since, really, there was no reason to use 7 or more steps design process for a one-man project. Still, management insisted on using that process all the time.

However, this was not just a isolated incident. Talking to other designers and colleagues, they are facing the same issues and challenges. Vast majority does see value in having the established process – and how could they not – there are many reasons for that, however, too often processes are being made so complex on purpose to make them look and appear more professional and serious.

How many steps are enough?

Just Google around.  Article on the Inspirationfeed suggests 7 design process steps designers should follow, About.com’s Graphic Design Process is close as well, at Academia similar approach can be found – here’s the example from University of California at Berkley and their 10 steps in design process. My former company, FatDUX uses 7 steps even stating that it is important to understand that process, as such, is linear and that any attempt to short-circuit individual steps will invariably lead to problems later on.

So, by looking at all these resources, it seems that there are no simple, 3 to 5 step processes that are easy to explain – both to clients and users? Well, there are some exceptions and my favorite one is one from the guys at frog design – we’ve all heard about them – and yet, their design process has only three steps – Discover, design and deliver they say. Of course, DDD acronym is here – you cut the number of steps, but you have to keep some of the coolness, right

Frog's design process with just three steps

Joking aside, I know that in a real life projects we are dealing with very complex steps and approaches and that this can lead to an idea that we should have complex design processes put in place to be sure that all and everything is being covered. I disagree. I believe that design process should be fairly loose and very flexible to allow numerous modifications and changes as the project is developing. And that also means that having fewer steps is just fine. However, I also believe that it should contain one characteristic – to start with a broad spectrum of possibilities, ideas and approaches and to end with something more focused, some concrete deliverable of any form.

That reminds me on Apple’s design process (or at least a bits we know about) – especially their “10 to 3 to 1” approach. Helen Walters from Businessweek has written an article about Apple’s design process you can still read online.

Back to frog again – I’m sure that they are not really having just three steps in their process, but those three are so freely defined and broad enough to allow modifications and cover most, if not all, scenarios.

By being general, sometimes you are able to take care of specifics in much better way instead of being obsessed by having too many steps to cover all phases and all possible outcomes.

It makes no sense, and apart from that, it’s not really applicable in the real-life.

If, on the other hand, you are looking to put bunch of steps in your design process in order to make yourself look smart and serious in front of your colleagues, competitors and users – I’d suggest you think twice.
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Parts if the hero / lead image have been used from AgilePoint website.

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