Day 102: UX & Design Trends in 2020 — Part 2: Design Process & Management
Design Process is in designer’s everyday lives. Whether we’re aware or not, whether it’s formally documented or part of the muscle memory, every design team has a process, so as every designer. What are the trends in design process in 2020? Here’s my prediction:
Virtual Design Sprint
In the past few years, I believe many of us have adopted Design Sprint in order to gain velocity in design process. It’s a powerful tool to expedite the user feedback loop for even faster version of “fail fast and fail often” with a lower cost/risk. Also, it has the economic value of transforming Design Thinking into a lower investment that’s easier to get stakeholders’ buy-in.
However, running a Design Sprint isn’t an easy job. As a Design Sprint Scrum Master, there are tons of planning and logistics work to do, before, during, and after the sprint. As more and more companies embracing remote collaboration for better work-life balance for employee, or simply economic reasons, the distributed locations seem to add another layer of challenge when teams collaborating in a Design Sprint. Fortunately, thought leaders like Robert Skrobe has explored this new field and found a success formula.
If we were to marry the Balanced 3-Legged Stool (Design, Product, Engineer) to the Product Iron Triangle (cheap, fast, good), Design Sprint might be the long-sought diamond ring that worth teams’ investment in the digital age. Since the world is flat, and global economy and collaboration is unstoppable, Virtual Design Sprint is definitely something that companies worth considering in 2020.
Design Systems 2.0
Building a Design System has been one of the hottest topics for quite a while; we’re clear on the business value of a design system, and the atomic model of the system structure. However, these days many realized that using the old design org model to create design system isn’t going to work. Just like buying a house isn’t the hardest part, it’s maintaining the house and make people happily living in it that makes it hard.
Unfortunately, (if we continue the house-shopping analogy), most of the discussions of design system are around how to draw that dreamy house, but not enough discussion about how to know if the child’s bedroom actually fits the child’s need (user research for design system), or how to prepare the construction material, the sustainability (working with development team), or evaluate the cost and market value of the house, when to move in and how to renovate (working with product team). Therefore, we’ll see more and more case studies about why design systems fail, and how we can better incorporate Product Thinking and UCD approach to ensure we’re not just realizing creative team’s pipe dream, but set sail on the right direction with collaboration in mind.
DesignOps Growth
More and more conversations around DesignOps start to take place. Since the trend of larger in-house design team is not stopping, there are more needs of properly-trained design managers , also the dire need of standardized process in order to escalate the UX maturity of non-design team in companies.
Although some argue that DesignOps is just another way to package Design Management, UX Playbook, and all other design administrative related topics into one big bag, to me, it’s quite important that these topics are being actively discussed, in order to optimize the process and environment for design to thrive, therefore the end product can shine.
Agility vs. Quality
By now, most of the companies have realized that Agile is not the silver bullet that can solve it all. It has the opposite benefit of traditional Waterfall process, but letting engineering team and their process runs everything has the fatal problem as described in the book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”.
There are more and more blog posts around Lean UX, UX research in Agile team, Dual Track, Tri Track, in the effort of balancing the benefit of speed from an Agile setup, but also getting first hand insights from users so that we don’t have to constantly doing guesswork.
Conclusion
With the increased UX maturity of various industries, system thinking in design & management gain more exposure to the leadership team, and therefore the required talents and processes are needed in order to keep design talents work happily and efficiently to generate the best results. We’re happy to see that the design industry is constantly experimenting various new processes for a better future.
Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts around UX & Design Trends? I’m eager to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
