Nobody Has Time To Think Any More

Good decisions often need time to emerge. They aren't the outcome of fast-paced experiments, chase for efficiency or velocity of shipping. They are the outcome of a slow, uncomfortable, sometimes painful independent thinking.

Too often teams rush too into brainstorming sessions, or AI guidance too early — without enough clarity of what exactly we want and — (more importantly!) — what exactly we do not want to create. Nobody has time to sit alone with a problem.

Give People Time To Think #

I absolutely love a blank piece of paper. It's an incredibly powerful medium to actually express your chaotic thoughts and put pieces of a puzzle together. Yet it's rare to see teams finding time to do just that. We jump into groupthink too early, with collaborative brainstorming sessions that leave little time for designers to actually be confronted with the problem and think about it on their own.

AI can be a good thought partner, but too often it drives you in a particular direction that you never had a chance to explore on your own. That's surely faster, but it skips the tiring, boring, inefficient but incredibly precious part of the process that I love the most — getting lost, getting challenged, hitting walls, discovering unknown unknowns.

All of it is a part of the creative process to find a problem worth solving. And in the words of Giorgia Lupi, it's the "translation of lived experience and nuanced thoughts into a unique point of view, and then to crystallize that perspective into something people can connect with.

Human experience is complex and particular. Creative work means contemplating and translating that complexity rather than flattening it. And too often, AI delivers an end result before creative thinking has happened at all."

There Is Value In Being Slow #

In chase of efficiency and velocity, we at times overlook that a lot of design happens when we waste time. Not because we are utterly inefficient, but because often it's a messy, chaotic but beautiful mixture of happy accidents, following hunches, drawing connections from personal experience or literally getting lost in a problem.

Slow is good! Careful and thoughtful design decisions don't happen by accident. They need time and space to emerge, and they don't occur by taking one shortcut after another. They appear in exploration, failures, detours, experiments and tons of sketches put on paper that nobody ever is going to see.

And then there are things that are put in documents, on paper, in voice memos and annual reports. And then there are things not mentioned explicitly: culture, the way people think and behave, what their intentions are, and what values they embed in a digital product simply by shaping it through words, code, design or product decisions.

30 Mins Of Thinking: Alone, Without AI #

The very first thing we do when we receive a new brief is to give everyone 30 mins in a meeting or a few days at home to study it, and write notes — alone. I encourage everyone to think about the unknowns, assumptions, problems worth working on, stakeholders, risks. And then we bring all these insights together and review. No AI is allowed at that stage.

That's where everyone gets a chance to come up with their own thoughts and ideas, and express them for everyone to explore and build upon. Eventually they land on a Miro board — and everybody's input is welcome, and not overridden by loud voices in the room.

Find Your People, Away From The Noise #

Paul Boag has built two small paid communities for designers — a place to slow down, think things through, and talk to people who genuinely get the challenges. Worth checking out if you've ever felt like you're fighting UX battles alone:

• Agency Academy — for freelancers and agency owners who want a better business, not a bigger empire. Weekly group calls, peer Slack, and people who actually get it.
• UX Insiders — for in-house designers, researchers and UX leads who want support navigating the politics, stakeholders and business cases that get in the way of good work. Run in partnership with Smashing Magazine.

Wrapping Up #

Perhaps we don't need better tools for faster and more efficient AI prototyping. We need to give people time and space to struggle with the problem on their own, on a painfully uncomfortable piece of paper, in silence — with enough time to wander and think.

I can also wholeheartedly recommend Giorgia Lupi's beautiful essay on New York Times (attached illustrations) — it goes into all the beautiful details of why slow detours are so much necessary — especially in times of AI. Kindly shared via Rob Alderson. 💚

Useful Resources #

• “In Defense Of The Detour”, by Giorgia Lupi, The New York Times (free account required)
• Giorgia Lupi on LinkedIn
• Agency Academy, by Paul Boag
• UX Insiders, by Paul Boag