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The magic missing link: design documentation
How the documenting process has developed foundations of product design practice.
When I was studying graphic design in college, there was always one thing required from every student at the end of the year — the process book. It was easy to tell which process books were scrapped together moments before the deadline. (Trust me, I tried once. My professors were not so impressed.)
It was in those developing years that I learned the importance and emphasis on process work as a way to help conceptualize patterns, relationships, and visual systems. Process made us diagnose the real design problems before we jumped into visual solutions.
Sound familiar?
Modern-day product designers encounter a multitude of problems from a wide range of reasons: outdated codebases, APIs returning invalid content types when there is an error or even disjointed teams within the company. Maybe there’s a customer complaint and there’s a cross-company confusion. Any of these small or large problems often create even larger problems that require a team to look holistically and specifically to more tangibly understand the problem(s) before running to look for solutions.
