Has Product Design become a commodity?
Template of death
As a UX professional I very much live by the mantra: “Solve real problems for real users”, and I am very aware that there are multiple ways to approach the work. Lean UX, Design Thinking, Hypothesis Driven Design, Human Centered Design, User-Centered Design, User-driven innovation and the list goes on. These methodologies and frameworks all to a smaller or larger extent offers tools and processes on how to capture ideas, refine them, solutionize them and validate them. No matter which approach you choose, you will be able to find templates and guides for how to execute design work.
The entry barrier to the industry have definitely lowered, which is great as we need good designers that can…well, “solve real problems for real users”.
However, this is exactly the core of my message of this blog post. You would be wrong to think that you can create good products by filling out templates and by following a process founded by Google. Because there is no one size fits all method. It is a benefit that there are so many frameworks out there, which all have different strengths and weaknesses. As a Product Manager, Service Designer, Product Designer or any other professional with the responsibility to lead new and ongoing product development processes, your focus should be on the context in which you are working. Start by understanding the problems at hand, the goals, the stakeholders, the timings and last but not least the budget. Once you have an understanding of this, it’s time to put your research, design and development process together. This is where good designers distinct themselves from the rest. The good designers use their understanding of the context to inform their decisions onto which relevant tools to apply during the process.
In many ways the field of UX and service design has reached a maturity stage, where you can search and find templates for pretty much any UX and design tool on the world wide web. You can download them, fill them out and go onto the next template and fill that out and so on. Design capabilities can be seen more and more as a commodity. Thus, it is important to distinguish between the ’template-followers’ and the practitioners that know their craft so well they are conscious of when to apply which tools and how, in order to maximise value creation and to build the right products.
Maturity level decides how willing the clients are in investing in the discovery and design phase.
Our clients come to us in all stages of their design maturity journey.
The appetite to invest into discovery and UX varies depending on the maturity level. This doesn’t mean that an immature client should get a worse experience or service. It simply means that the designers will need to adapt to the situation. A good example of this is the way we have run and facilitated five day design sprints. At Nodes we have facilitated those for the last 3–4 years for global enterprises, start ups, scale ups and small- and medium-sized companies. The five day design sprint process can be done by following a textbook. If I am being a bit harsh I could say that anyone that can read can perform and run a five day design sprint. I know that is not how it is in reality, but I hope you get my point. The good designer will not only question the goals and the decisions taken, but also the method and the framework. In the case of the five day design sprints we have modified the method based on our own experiences, so that it fits into the context, budgets and time constraints of our clients. This has resulted in multiple ways to run and facilitate the five day sprints, and we are not alone in doing this. Earlier this year, Invision launched their 2.0 version of the five day sprint. I really like the sentiment of 2.0. The idea of iterating on the framework, launch it, learn and iterate again is exactly how we like to think about design tools and processes.
In short, the good designers are double loop learners that can use their knowledge not only to reflect on the outcome and output of processes, but also to question whether the way to get to these results were the right one. These designers are able to look beyond the templates and tailor their work to the given context and maturity level of the clients. In conclusion, we believe that the entry barrier to the world of Product Design has lowered. However, we don’t think that it has become a commodity to be able to do great Product Design.
If you want to learn more about how we create best in class Product Design and our design team in general please feel welcome to reach out.
