Bye literal design, hello design thinking
While digital development has been through seismic changes in work processes (see agile software development), design has been surprisingly unaffected by those changes. Unsurprisingly, itâs not working.
Designers are still expected to produce a specification, approved by the Product Owner that will be then handed over to âthe developersâ to build as literally as possible and passed on to QA to test, again, as close as possible to the original specification. If this sounds waterfall-y is because it is, itâs just that in âagileâ the design cycles are much shorter.
This obsolete set up stubbornly demands that the designer has ALL the answers at the point of design and insists that the world cannot possibly change from drawing to product.
This literal view of the product âas designedâ is divisive and perpetuates a siloed mentality to production, one discipline never enriching other disciplines.
The tyranny of the pixel needs to give way to a more holistic design thinking approach facilitated by designOps, where everyone in the delivery team, from product owner to QA tester, participates of the productâs sentiment and principles and applies those in their role.
