Factors that affect designers’ workflows

The design process can include so many things that it becomes somewhat difficult for one to describe it. Depending on the methodology you adopt, it can consist of many different methods and deliverables, each one serving its purpose.

Many opinions exist regarding the best product design methodology, the most critical deliverable, and the most efficient design process. The truth is, that even if you accept that a particular design process is the ideal and believe that you should follow it, reality comes in and proves that sometimes your circumstances just don’t allow you to follow it respectfully and that you have to tweak it to your needs.

For the past five years here at Proto.io, we have been communicating with a wide range of designers:

Designers who are entrepreneurs and aspire to do everything by themselves.

Designers who are the single design person in their company (usually a relatively small team).

Designers who are part of a small design team within an organization.

Big design departments where each designer usually works on a particular part of the design process.

Designers in design agencies, where design is what they do exclusively.

Designers sometimes need to wear many hats.

Each one of these types of designers works in very different circumstances that most of the times play a crucial role in the way they work.

We have observed that the more hats a designer needs to put on (whether within the design spectrum or out of it, e.g., marketing, business, etc.), the less time s/he apparently has to focus on doing design the “right way”. Furthermore, no one can argue that the smaller the team, the more hats a designer has to put on to achieve her/his goals.

The more hats designers need to wear, the less time they have for doing design the “right way”.

When you have limited time at your disposal, you have to optimize the way you utilize it. You need to prioritize on the “important — unimportant” scale. Depending on your position in the range as mentioned earlier, what you consider “important” will undoubtedly differ.

Factors that may influence importance and prioritization include:

how essential the activity is for the end product

how easy it is to complete

whose involvement is needed

how much time it needs

how much pressure you have to deliver

how much the boss likes it

whether it falls under the adopted product design methodology

what the client is willing to pay for, etc.

One thing we heard all designers continuously bring up is time (do I use a smiley face or a sad face here, I wonder…) Too many things to do, not enough time to do them all. You need to continually filter out activities that don’t give you the maximum value.

Designers want to optimize their workflow. Use the fastest tools to achieve the best results. But they cannot spend the time to learn new tools that need onboarding etc.