Forget the steps. Follow the signals.
Don’t trust THE design process. Make your own path
I love this sentiment: Don’t trust THE design process1.
Here's what to do instead: make your own path, trust the signals.
The hexagon, the diamond, the infinite loop (you name it) can be useful. They give structure, language, and a sense of momentum. But they only take you so far. At some point, you’ll bend them, skip steps, backtrack, or BREAK OUT ENTIRELY.
The reality is design lives in the messy middle, full of ambiguity, uncertainty, and constant change. Design exists to bring clarity before someone else takes it further.
Take this harsh truth: design rarely follows a clean path. It unfolds. It nudges us to navigate.
And navigating it?
It’s like, “being put in a random stranger’s house and being told to cook them dinner.” You don’t know if they’re vegan, vegetarian, nut free, or religiously anti-coconut. You don’t know what’s in their fridge, where their utensils are, or how their stove works—and at the end of it all, they probably wanted a veggie burrito instead of beef stroganoff.2
—Andrea Small & Kelly Schmutte (Book: Navigating Ambiguity Creating Opportunity in a World of Unknowns)
From my experience, failing many times, reflecting in hindsight, and fixing how I design. Again, I want to echo this:
What I’ve learned instead is to trust that asking good questions can help uncover the right process for me. In other words: practice the meta-ability to design the design work.
“Meta ability is about recognizing a project as a design problem and then deciding on the people, tools, techniques, and processes to use to tackle it.”3
—Carissa Carter, Academic Director at the Stanford d.school
At its core meta-ability means stepping back and asking:
What’s happening here? What is this project really asking of me?
From there notice what matters, sense change, surface what’s missing, and explore new possibilities.
1. Notice what’s meaningful
Finding design direction, surfacing values, identifying anchors.
What themes keep emerging from our research or conversations?
What do people really care about, even if they don’t say it explicitly?
Which design moments are emotionally charged or spark strong reactions?
2. Sense what’s shifting
Navigating changes, noticing early signals, iteration points.
Are there signs that the original problem has evolved?
How has our team’s energy or alignment shifted since we started?
What feedback are we starting to hear more often?
3. Watch for what’s missing
Identifying blind spots, surfacing risks, ethics.
Whose voice or perspective is not represented in this design?
What assumptions are we building into the flow?
Is there a step or moment we’ve skipped that might be important?
4. Explore what’s possible
Ideation, divergent thinking, reframing stuck challenges.
What idea feels exciting but just out of reach?
If we didn’t have the usual limits, what could we try?
What’s something unexpected that might actually work?
Think of these four questions as your compass in uncertain territory—they help you move with direction when you don't have a map.
Reflecting on these kinds of questions, you begin to challenge your usual go-to methods and make sense of why you're doing something in the first place. If something doesn’t quite add up, you start wondering: Is there a better way to do this?
This shift in thinking and working moves you from following a fixed path to grounding yourself in the context and asking, What should I actually do here? You start dancing with the messiness, rather than trying to force it into a straight, linear path.
From following a fixed process to crafting a contextual one.
From treating artifacts as the end goal to focusing on answering the right questions and validating hypotheses.
From: “Oh, I need to do a persona, empathy map, customer journey map, wireframing, and this and that…@#$%^&*()_#$%^&*()_”
To: What’s the right way to approach it, this time?
If the team keeps talking about trust as a value, but it feels vague and you’re unsure how it should guide the design of the new service you’re working on, tune into the feeling of “I need to know what trust really means here,” and ask: “What should I do right now to better understand it?” The answers might be different from one project to another. Maybe you have someone in the company who deeply understands a certain topic. Maybe you decide to speak directly with users. Or you start with some desk research. Or later, you might test a concept in front of users, with “trust” as your grounding thread or whatever makes sense in your context.
Down this path — designing your design work — you’ll probably feel uncertain most of the time. You’ll find yourself questioning: Am I choosing the right method? Am I working with the right collaborator?
But the tricky part, which I often get asked about, is: How can I not overthink and get paralyzed when making choices?
“How do you know if you’ve chosen the right methods, approaches, or collaborators?”
Well… how do you know if what you’ve designed is going to work? You don’t know until you test it. But at the very least, you start with the end in mind: What does success look like for this design?
Ask yourself the same question when you’re designing your own path: What does success look like for using this approach, this tool, or working with this person?
If you’re facilitating a co-creation session, success might look like: by the end, everyone feels aligned and even energized to move forward.
If you choose to build a quick prototype and share it, success could be: getting early signals, do users get it? Do they trust it? Where do they hesitate?
If you pull in a collaborator, like a researcher, a content designer, or someone from support, success might look like: they help you see something you wouldn’t have seen on your own.
But what if it all goes sideways? Well…
Adjusting on the go means continuous sensemaking.
Don't wait until the fifth user test when the second one already showed confusion. Switch from high-fidelity to interactive prototypes when concepts feel too abstract. Step in as facilitator when you sense team indecision.
Since there's always something we don't know until we test it, label experiments as 'pilots' — it makes the idea more palatable for others.
Keep asking: Is this what I expected?
And in hindsight: How could I have done this differently?"
Designing your design work means asking yourself:
From: What is happening here?
To: What should I actually do here? and What does success look like for using this approach, this tool, or working with this person?
Then: Is this what I expected? How could I have done this differently?
Why does this matter more than ever?
Because AI is reshaping design work.
Structured, predictable processes are domains where AI thrives, and to be honest, we can’t compete. I’m not a Luddite4; I use AI and love how it helps me at work.
But I do think we need to future-proof ourselves, not just by learning AI tools, but by leaning into the human skills that thrive because of the mess.
Skills like:
Embracing ambiguity
Not blindly trusting the design process. Trusting our agency to build sense-making scaffolds from uncertainty
Make our own path
This is our edge.
So next time you're tempted to follow the prescribed process, stop. Ask yourself: What's actually happening here? Then design your way forward."
Until next time,
Thomas
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