Jenny Wen: The design process is dead. Why Designers ca… — Transcript

Okay, imagine this... It is the start of a quarter, your team has to figure out what to do, and you're like, cool, I know exactly what to do, I know the steps to follow.

So you go do some user research, you go and take that user research and you make this persona, it's perfect, it's got demographic data, and it's got a fake name and a photo that you've generated.

And from that user persona, you make this perfect user journey map, and it shows every step of this person's journey through your product, all the problems they have, all the emotional sequences they're going through.

And then you as a designer, you're like, okay, cool, we're going to go lead a brainstorm and bring all your cross-functional partners in, and there you're going to brainstorm all the problems that you can solve to help meet your OKRs.

And then you write the perfect problem statement, maybe it starts with how might we. Maybe it's actually in this format, it's like, as a blank, I want to blank, so that I can blank, so that way you can really understand the user's goals and problems.

And then you're like, okay, it's time for a brainstorm again, a lot more sticky notes, except this time you're brainstorming solutions instead of problems. And then you pick a solution and you're like, cool, I'm going to go do wireframes, going to do them really low-fi first, and then I'm going to go a little higher fidelity, maybe like this.

And then it's time for research again, you're going to take the solutions, you're going to understand what the problems there are from users, and then they're going to make them higher fidelity, and they're going to look great like this. And hurray, you just did this perfect design process, you solved all the company's problems, you made millions of dollars, you created a product that people really love, right?

Right? Yeah. I am calling bullshit.

Also, hi, my name is Jenny Wen. I'm normally based out of Brooklyn, New York, but I'm actually from the Toronto area in Canada.

Work-wise, I'm a design lead at Anthropic, where I work on the core Claude.ai product, which is a chatbot built on top of the Claude foundational models. I joined earlier this year in January.

But before that, I was at Figma for five and a half years, where I was Director of Design. I led teams at that led a handful of new products and our growth teams, so FigJam, Slides, Community, Figma Buzz, Site CMS, and our growth teams. And I was also the first designer on FigJam, and I took it to launch and grew that team as well.

And before that, I was at Dropbox for a few years, where I was a designer on Dropbox Paper, the document editor. I don't know if you remember it. I just got an email this week that they're shutting down the mobile apps, rest in peace. Um, it was just one of the first document editors that challenged the norms of Google Docs and made it really sort of pleasant to use.

Okay, so where were we? You know, you'd followed this design process, you, you know, solved world peace, and you made this beautiful product, and you made so much money, right?

Okay, so this is where you have that like DJ scratch sound effect. Um, that did not sound very realistic at all, right? But at the same time, that's the process that everyone has been preaching for the past few years and has been taught to us in schools, and maybe some people even have like an MBA in this process.

But we actually need to do a reality check of this environment that we're in right now. So first thing to consider is AI. I don't know, maybe you've heard of it, but uh, it stands for Artificial Intelligence, in case you actually weren't aware.

Basically what's happening is tools are changing, AI is making us more capable, there are a bunch of new tools popping up. I feel like there's new tools that come up every day, and I'm overwhelmed, I don't know all the tools to try. And the thing that's changing because of this is basically a PM can get to a working prototype faster than you can write this perfect problem statement or write a brainstorm. They do this without doing any research, making any personas, etc.

And I've seen this at a few companies now where actually it's the expectation that product managers, for example, are vibe coding or prototyping. And this is something that just used to be the designer's responsibility, but now becomes the responsibility of more and more functions.

But at the same time, it's also making designers more powerful too. You know, it's no longer should designers code, but designers can code. We don't have to just make static pictures anymore. We can prototype really easily, and we can implement to fit and finish all all by ourselves.

So the reality check here is that it's outdated, the design process is really outdated for today's tools and tech. It's feeling less and less right for this moment.

Another thing I'm hearing a lot is, 'Do less with more.' I think this one's been pretty universal for the past few years, and I'm hearing about this both from IC designers as well as leaders across the industry.

There've been a lot of layoffs and headcount reductions, maybe you've been impacted by it too, either as a leader or a designer. And I think people are just realizing that it's possible and sometimes even more effective to have smaller teams as well. It's less coordination overhead, and I think small teams are really powerful actually.

But at the same time, our roles are evolving. You know, we had we were designers, we had these existing responsibilities that fell within our bucket. But because of things like AI, you know, we are expected to span more and more parts of our roles, and that's actually more possible, like being more PM-shaped and strategic, or also implementing a prototyping our work. And I think the exact same thing is also happening to all these other functions around us.

So in this world, do we even have time to follow this rigid process? Like, what can we be cutting from it to make room for all these other things we're now expected to do? I think the good thing is, like, I don't think we need all these steps.

And so the reality is, our roles are changing, we're expected to do more with less, and we just don't have time to follow a process to a T anymore.

I'm hearing more and more of these words, you know, 'taste' and 'craft' and 'quality.' We're throwing these around more and more and talking about them in terms of the design process.

I think the running hypothesis that comes from this is that in a world where you can start to make anything with AI, what really matters is your ability to choose and curate what you make. I think that's a good hypothesis.

Like if you can one-shot prompt something that looks like this, what does that mean for designers? Like, this is not really that good, but it does raise the bar, and it raises the floor and the baseline of what a designer is expected to do. Like, your work has to be better than this for you to be valuable and somebody that could be hired.

I've also noticed that we're like starting to gravitate towards apps like this, like the Not Boring Software apps. Uh, this one is called the is this one is their camera app, which is just, it's a camera app, but it's beautiful, and it has all these tactile knobs and sound effects, and it just feels delightful to use. This doesn't feel like you could just make it with a few prompts.

Or apps like Linear, which it's it's a task tracking app. We've all used different task tracking apps, they're a dime a dozen, but it's well-crafted, it's fast, it's snappy to use. People like using it and prefer to pay for it.

Or apps like Notion Calendar, which again, it's like not that different functionality-wise, but it feels high craft and worth paying for. I think these apps are the anti-AI slop. They feel valuable to pay for, they're enjoyable to use. And when I talk to the designers behind these apps, and the highest craft designers I know, they didn't make their work with any set process, let alone like the design process.

So I think the reality is, there aren't these great there aren't steps in the design process that encourage great craft. It's just like not the right process for this, and it never really compensated in a way that helped you do great craft.

And finally, every project is just so different, and the range of projects that we're working on is changing too. The design process was like selling you something like this, like a format, a step-by-step thing where you can worship, and it said like, every day you do this, and it'll even ensoul you like entire degrees in ways to do the design process.

But then I think what ended up happening to us is that it made people worship this process and spend a lot of time on these process artifacts, not the end result. I see this in portfolios all the time where there's like 80% process artifacts, and you can tell they spent so much time on these things, and then like there's one screen at the very end that is like, just the is like, here's the end experience.

The design process taught us like, follow these steps in this like very rigid order in this, you know, in these these arrows.

But I think the reality is, like, the user doesn't give a shit about the process artifacts you made or whether you made the perfect user journey. They care about the end experience that they're feeling and seeing.

And every project is just so different. You know, every project has different stakeholders, complexity, problem space, unknowns, technical constraints, timelines, business needs, staffing, etc. There's just no way that the same set of steps works across all of these different companies.

You just can't produce great work this way. Yeah, like it just doesn't produce better work, and you can't repeat this process for every single project.

But oddly enough, the sentiment in the industry in the last while has been, you know, 'Trust the process.' Follow the steps, have a rigorous design process, and you're doing your job really well. Well, I'm here to say, don't trust the process. It just doesn't really make sense, especially in this new era. And I'm sorry if this is a process you love, trust, rely on, or is mandated by your job, but honestly, it's my policy here. This is going to be uncomfortable, but I think discomfort is what is warranted to help us shepherd in this new era.

I get how we got here though. You know, in the early 2000s, we were doing this sort of work, which was gorgeous, but we were pivoting from graphic design and web design into designing full fully experienced apps. And and things where people were on their mobile phones, had to consider all the environment around them. And we were just seen as these people who just come in and like make things pretty.

But there's this whole movement, you know, design needed a seat at the table. We needed to have legitimacy, we needed also to design for more complex experiences, and we weren't just designing a simple, you know, step-by-step web page anymore, but we were designing for like complex mobile apps.

So then there's this this explosion in the idea of design thinking and user-centric design. Generally, I think all good things because we considered not just how things looked, but how they felt, how they worked, how they could impact the day-to-day of someone's lives, and their impact on the business as well.

But because of that, I think we tilted the balances a lot, you know, where we prioritized strategy way over craft to the extent that our overall craft suffered.

And so I now I think we need to re-tip the balances a little bit more. Make sure our job balances both strategy and craft. But we also have to untangle this like hairball of mess of like these new factors that are in our world right now. Things like, you know, lower barriers to design, all this exponential change from AI, role shifting, less headcount, craft, and new tools. Oh, there goes the slide. But these things are changing maybe faster than they have been in the last 10 to 15 years.

So for our sake, we cannot trust the old process anymore. But but even before this, I think I was already not trusting this process. And that's partly because in the last few years, the work of designers that I've seen in the industry, like I've just just grown increasingly skeptical of this the ability of the process to create great work.

Most of the time when I think about the work that I'm proudest of or most in awe of, they're usually not using this process or anything close to it. The best work that I've seen is, it's starting from solution first, not a problem actually. A solution that everyone gravitates towards and makes everybody say, 'Wow!' It's when a team cares so much, they spend a lot of time editing on the details and just trying to get them right.

Or when a designer has strong intuition or conviction. Maybe it's not something that everyone agrees with off the bat, or it doesn't show up directly in a user research study.

It's when a designer skips steps or when they make them up to get what they need, or when a team does something just for the sake of making people smile. Not because it came up in a persona or a user journey, but because they wanted to make people smile.

So let's start with this one and break it down a bit. Starting from solution first. For some reason, with the design process, this felt super illegal, and you just like couldn't do it, or you were a bad designer.

One example is when the team at Anthropic, this predated me, when they created Claude Artifacts, where artifacts are basically this right panel that is showing you like the interactive code. Basically, this was they were the team was the first kind of like AI team to actually create this pattern, but it's used across like all these different AI apps now, and it basically generates code instantly and lets you interact with it right there.

This was a prototype that one of the researchers on the team built, and it, you know, it doesn't look awesome, but it it basically when Claude was generating code, it would create this interactive artifact on the side, and it was just really kind of like interesting to see. But one of the designers on the team, Michael, he saw this and he was like, 'I love this.' And he iterated on it and built his own prototype, and the reactions across the team were just so positive, and they just felt like there was something there. It didn't come from a product problem statement, but and but when we launched it, it was really successful. It was just this thing that finally made people realize like, oh shit, like AI is not just writing code, but it's like creating these interactive applications that I can use. I think it fundamentally changed the way that people perceived AI. And if we I think if we started problem statement first, we maybe would have never gotten here. We didn't know that it was a problem worth solving until we actually saw the solution.

And this used to happen mostly on teams with like really good prototypers, but with all these new tools, I think it's starting to happen all the time, and not just with designers either. It's starting to be the expectation. But this feels sort of illegal in the old design process, right?

But I think what we're seeing more and more now, especially if you're working with AI, or products that are built on top of AI, which I think more and more of us probably are over time, we have this like new technology. It's like pretty drastically different than anything we've ever seen. It's new. We sort of know what it's good at. But since it's new, we have all these existing problems that we solved before without AI. And we basically have to look at all of them and see, and say like, hey, how do we actually take this technology that's new and apply it backwards to all these problems? Like, how can we solve these problems in a different way? I think this is like fundamentally different than the last era because the technology was relatively static. We didn't have anything that like changed the game for us this much. And that and because of that, we had to look for problems to solve instead of solutions to have.

And we basically at at Anthropic do this every time the model gets better. We see what it's capable of and what it's good at, and we have to figure out like, hey, what problems could it solve to help people? So, for example, in the last year or so, the Claude model has gotten better at a bunch of these things. You know, it's gotten larger context windows, a better ability to use tools like searching, etc. It's able to orchestrate agents, it's able to plan and do multi-step reasoning. And all those capabilities made it possible for us to launch the research feature earlier this year, where Claude can basically go off for 10, 20 minutes at a time and write you this full-on research report, which is like kind of a marvel, right? It's basically deploying these like sub-agents to do different parts of this, slowing down to think about what to write, as opposed to before when AI would just like spit out an answer instantaneously and not think that hard about it. But this is all because the technology got us there first.

So it's okay to do things out of order, especially in this AI era where the technology is changing faster than ever. I think it changes the process that we need to use. Another way that I've seen really great work made is when the team just like cares ruthlessly about the details.

So, for example, we launched FigJam in 2021, and we launched it, and it worked pretty well. But after the launch, we weren't just like adding new features to it. We just continued to iterate on it and make the quality better. So we spent a large percentage of time in the years that followed just iterating on details, making sure the core mechanics of the product actually felt good. We iterated on snapping and and alignments, we changed the way that we showed selection borders on canvas to feel less noisy. We iterated on the colors a bunch just to make sure we were we were we got the right range, and we the colors weren't too loud. We added a bunch of ways to change the font size and adjust them. We gave images a border so that we'd stand up stand out on canvas. We iterated a bunch on how shapes would overflow as you were typing. We tweaked and refined a bunch of the toolbar interactions and so so many more. Like I could probably fill a full talk slot just like talking about the iterations that we made over time.

But the actual process for this was like not the standard design process. It was like more like this where you're just like continuing to do a long tail of quality and iterations endlessly. It's not something this like double diamond thing just really makes room for. We're always just trying to learn and iterate and make things better.

They take time, you know, like they take concerted time, they're not accommodated for the design process. It's just something that you have to care about, and you have to allot time for. Okay, another way that I've seen great work made is just operating on intuition. And I think this is like one of my favorites because I love intuition.

And I think intuition is just like a dirty word for designers. Like it's it's like you're not being user-centric enough, you don't care. You're not data-centric enough, you that's that's not legit if you're just using your intuition. But intuition is not guessing.

I think people think it's like vibes or guessing or whoever has the best argument, but I actually think intuition is incredibly valuable, and it's actually incredibly rare. It's something you have to build. I think intuition is the ability to make reasoned judgments quickly. It's a shortcut to thinking really long and hard or having to gather evidence because you know the subject area so deeply and in such an expert way. I think having great intuition is something to be respected and to really aspire to. I don't think we should be looking down on it. Like, I think we should be trying to build it. I think these are some of the ways that I have been trying to build mine.

I just built it by like constantly reading feedback about the product, whether that's in Twitter or Reddit or wherever you know, you find feedback about your product. Sometimes it's internal feedback boards. I think your sales team might be collecting it a lot too, so talk to them. I make sure I go to user research sessions regularly. I watch back old ones, I read old reports. I will go to user research sessions that are not about my part of the product just because I'm learning more about our user base.

I'm looking at dashboards regularly. I just like see what the trends are on overall usage and activity. I'm also drawing on things that are like these cognitive biases and design principles that you learn in like a textbook from school and psychology, because I think these things are just like helping you predict how people behave and make decisions overall.

But what I'm doing here, I think, really is like building my internal model of the world, of our users and our end product, so that way I don't have to research every single decision or A/B test every single decision. I'm trying to make educated guesses to move quickly. But also, I think it creates better design work because you now apply this intuition not towards just like big product decisions, but as well as like smaller ones, like, oh, how do I group these buttons together, or like, what do I show on this like login page?

Because intuition is not guessing. We're building great intuition. Like, that is what is going to make you a great designer because you're going to wield this intuition for decisions of all sizes and scales, like picking the right design pattern for defending a design or making a snap choice. That's like something you can't really pay for or get AI to generate.

The next way that I've seen great work made is skipping steps and making them up. Also, a favorite of mine. So you probably know the Google Ventures Design Sprint. It's like pretty rigid, and they say they're like really adamant about how every step really matters. You can't you know, there's reasons that they're there. And I've run this sprint a bunch of times, but honestly, like, most of the time, I'm like, these steps don't really matter to me right now, and they don't feel useful. And I think especially if you're at a startup, like, a whole week is such a long time. Like, that's like a year in startup time.

So over the years, I've run a bunch of different variants of it, where I mix the steps, remove them, etc. And this is like one of my favorite ways to do it, where I just spend most of the time prototyping and ideating, because I find that prototypes are the thing that that like, when you produce them out of the sprint, people really see them, and they really understand the concept. So I also do it in three days as opposed to five, and I think this is the thing that's worked for me and the teams I've been on, but I try to play with it every time, and maybe something else works better for you and your team.

Another process thing is the working backwards Amazon thing, where you write a press release to imagine how a reporter would write about your feature. And I like the goal of this, but it felt static and not relevant to us when we're using this at Figma. So I thought, how do I actually make this work for us?

And so I think the Figma equivalent is the tweet, you know, because we always like would talk to our users a bunch, and we would communicate with them through there. And so I made this component one time for a brainstorm where instead of a press release, I got them to imagine like, hey, how would someone react on Twitter to this feature? And this is the component in use actually for a bunch of FigJam features that I built, like cursor chat, handshakes, emotes, and stamps. And you can actually see the first sketches of those features here. And when we actually did launch the product, we saw tweets that resembled these, which was really cool to see because it meant that these features that we built actually evoked the emotions that we wanted them to.

And something similar I also tried doing is, uh, writing and making fake landing page headlines to imagine how we might might package features together and brainstorm those features. This is another riff on the on the press release that felt faster and like more relevant to us at Figma. I love just trying to figure out every time like what steps make the most sense for my team and to get the best results. It's actually like weirdly fun to me.

Because I sort of think about the existing design process as like this like set of instructions that you get from IKEA furniture that's like kind of hard to decipher. Um, and it's just the same steps, you follow them every time, and you're supposed to get an outcome, right? But the thing is, when you're designing something, it's kind of different. Like you actually don't know what the end outcome is. Like, you don't know if it's going to be this Billy bookshelf. It could also be a chair, or a lamp, or even like a hot dog. Like you just you start the process and you actually don't know what you're trying to get at the very end, unlike IKEA furniture. So if you don't know what you're building, how do you know what the steps are, right? Like, how can you use the same steps to get to that that results every time?

So here's where that dirty word intuition comes into play again. You have to use another part of your intuition in this new world to know how to get through a project. No one's going to hand you this manual that's going to solve all your problems.

So your value as a designer is honing the process to get to the best results, not following one. If anyone if you could follow a process, then like anyone could do it.

Finally, the last way that I've seen great work made is doing something just for the sake of making people smile. So if you've ever played with these features in FigJam, the stamps, the emotes, the the cursor chat, they're some of my favorite things that I've ever built I've built in my career ever. But part of our process for them, honestly, was just prototyping them in real code, trying them out in our internal builds, and we just like show up to people's meetings and ask them to try them out. Like these are actual recordings of people trying them out in meetings, uh, with the prototypes.

And even as we were prototyping them, there was like a ton of usability issues and things wrong with them, but we noticed that people were smiling, laughing, and they transformed them from the beginning of the meeting. And so we knew there was something good there and that we had to keep going. And ultimately, when we launched these features, they set the precedence for a ton of other features on FigJam, but also at Figma generally. The goal became to just like make people smile, and we just added details that would be delightful, and that was some of like the work that everyone was most proud of there, I think.

These didn't come from a problem statement. There's no step in the process for them. They just came from a team of design designers and engineers that cared very deeply. So there's a list of things I mentioned. Everyone loves a summary slide. Uh, but unlike the design process, these aren't hard and fast rules. You should probably shouldn't do all of them in anything. You don't need to do them in order. They don't guarantee good work even. And they're probably also a ton of other things that I missed. Like, you've probably done great thing other things on your teams that have created great work that I don't have on the here.

So I hope I've shown you this old adage, like, 'Trust the process.' I think that's dead in this new era. We can't really trust the process anymore. And personally, I don't ever think we really could have trusted it, but in this era more than ever, we can't.

Our roles are changing. The tools that we're using are changing. But at the same time, the design process that's dictated to us is the same. You know, our value isn't in repeating a process. If it was, anybody could be a designer.

We're rewriting the process right now. This is like pretty scary because we don't have precedent to follow, but I don't know about you, it's like sort of fun for me.

We need to both figure out what we're building and the map to getting there every single time. But our power is in wielding the right tools, and mixing and matching, and creating great results, no matter how we got there. So we can't trust the process. If we want to both survive and thrive through this era, we have to do something scarier, bolder, but at the same time, more exhilarating, I think.

We have to trust ourselves again. As designers, as practitioners, as people with experience and a valuable skill set, we have to trust ourselves to try new things, to wield the right tools, to feel and know when we've designed something or built something great. It's the most empowering, but also probably one of the most vulnerable things we can do right now. It's time. Thank you.