Waterfall in disguise.
Throughout my career at design agencies, I’ve been involved in one too many conversations about the design process. These conversations always end with the consensus to kill the waterfall process because it’s non-iterative, lengthy, it doesn’t respect the designers mindset, yadda yadda.
As the matter of fact, all the new diagrams I’ve seen of proposed new methodologies, pushing the concept of design iterations, I feel are no less than waterfalls in disguise of a whirlpool.
Are these “iterations” really a break-through in the way we work?
And really, if we do want improve the iteration idea, I think we should push further this concept to be a “star.”
The star truly represents how a designer brain works. A traditional “web designer” (before the advent of specializations) knows that before moving too far in sketching or visual design, you need to try & test. And the connection between each phases are not a cycle but more of a neural network.
