Chapter 18 – Output Is More Important Than Process

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action
is the most difficult thing in the world.
~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It’s fairly common in design portfolios to see an explanation of one’s process or the steps a designer took to arrive at the final design. Within reason, this can be enlightening and show the critical-thinking skills of the designer.

In my experience when hiring designers, though, if the portfolio piece started with this explanation and hid the final outcome until many pages later, then it was a massive red flag.

Why?

Because often the output was ugly, basic, or copied. You will have read ten pages of in-depth exploration and design exercises only to arrive at a card interface that looks precisely like Pinterest.

A designer’s methodology and process can serve as vital tools to help you arrive at the needed solution. But that output is the ultimate aim, and the process is to serve that output, not the other way around.

This becomes a problem when some flexibility is needed in a team, or some speed is key to meet an opportunity or threat. If a designer insists that every request follows a prescribed path before anything can be produced, their value greatly diminishes as they are no help to their team at a critical juncture.

This often rears its ugly head with grand, limiting statements, such as:

• “Well, we need a brief before we can begin.”
• “How can we best serve the user if we don’t have the user persona fully fleshed out?”
• “We can’t build the screens until we have the design system in place!”

While briefs, user personas, and design systems are useful and powerful tools a design team will use to best plan out a solution, there are often occasions that call upon everyone to drop everything and charge into battle. If you demand to have these all aligned before you can begin your “best work,” you are hampering your usefulness to the team and can be seen as unreliable when the inevitable challenges arise.

It is important to be agile and confident enough to lean on your experience and taste to forgo all preferred information and steps to begin pushing pixels. If you can rise up, meet the challenge, and begin delivering the layouts and images your team needs in a trying moment, you will come to be relied upon and sought after.

What I’m Not Saying

• You should never push for design briefs, personas, design systems, etc.
• Design systems are not important, so you should just output.
• Be a Jpeg machine without thought.
• Do not try and steer the organization to design processes that will produce better results.
• Do not show your thinking or process in your portfolio.

What I Am Saying

• Do not be a slave to these systems or inputs.
• Know when to put your head down and output.
• Focus on serving the team rather than serving a process.
• Show the end design first, then talk about how you got there.
• Lean on your expertise and intuition to fill information gaps to help your team.