Good design takes time. I’ve worked in many different ways over my career from waterfall to agile to lean UX. Without doubt, despite good people with good intentions, trying to force the design process into a straight manufacturing line or agile development process might sound good in theory but in practice doesn’t work. In my experience, working that way only produces mediocre designs at best.
The one process that I’ve seen generate the most compelling and innovative designs is unsurprisingly the simplest. Forget all of your jargon, points, sprints and acronyms. It’s a process that acknowledges the reality that the creative process is not a straight line. It’s an exploratory process of pushing and pulling ideas in different directions, of leaning into ideas and iterating. It’s a process of discovery to find more solutions than your first idea. This exploratory process needs time. Time to explore, to think, to design, to prototype, test, review and iterate.
Once you’ve explored all the options, you simply pick a direction with confidence having known you looked at all the options, the pros and cons of each and made an informed decision. I’ve found embracing this iterative and exploratory creative process produces the best results.
If you have a project in mind that you would like to collaborate on, I'd love to hear about it!
