Product Designer’s Fluid Process
What is the Fluid process and why is it needed?
As a designer, we are tasked to create a certain user experience for a specific set of users. This task can happen in a fast-paced company setting where for example, designs are implemented with minimal research or a medium-paced company where research precedes design decisions.
Here’s where the need to be a fluid designer is important.
A designer needs to take the shape of the environment they are put in, to work with the product they are tasked with and work according to the timelines and process already followed in the product.
To make this more complex, a big company may have different departments for different products, each with different processes. In this setting too, a designer is expected to perform just as efficiently as when they are picked from 1 department and placed into another.
The fluidity needed to work as a designer is a very elemental and unappreciated skill, and I hope through this article I can surface this exceptional ability.
As we all know, the Design Thinking process that provides equal weightage and iteration time for all phases of the process. That would look something like this —
However that is not always how a designer always follows in daily life.
During my internship at RingCentral, I worked on real products and deadlines, and my process changed. The product was evolving and we were taking steps to make it better.
As a full-time employee, I was given the responsibility of other products, and based on those team settings, my process too took multiple other forms like this —
Currently, the product I work on requires instant results as it is customer request driven. Hence the process looks something like this.
