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AI is hollowing out the middle of design, leaving an hourglass behind
For fifteen years, the design process kept growing while the time left for making the product kept shrinking. The middle of that process is draining now, with the weight moving out to the two ends.
Product teams run a design process between deciding what to build and building it, and over the past fifteen years that process kept swelling and stretching until the process became its own job. The Double Diamond breaks it into four stages, Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, and each stage grew deliverables of its own. Nielsen Norman Group’s working list runs to research reports, personas, journey maps, flowcharts, wireflows, sketches, wireframes, prototypes and the specifications written for handoff, and the process expanded so much so that firms sell expert-led extensive courses on navigating chaos that comes with process.
The workshops and the slides about the workshops go on top of that list where a designer’s significant chunk of hours went into stretching out the middle of the process. The product, which a user would ever touch, got whatever was left. Kate Kaplan named the result in the firm’s own pages in July 2019, writing that designers are often too busy to design.
