By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”

“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”

There are a multitude of viable culprits behind this revenue drop. Robson himself pointed to the pandemic and tightened global budgets while arguing that “the widespread adoption of design thinking . . . has reduced demand for our services.” (Ideo was, in part, its own competition here since for years, it sold courses on design thinking.) It’s perhaps worth noting that, while design thinking was a buzzword from the ’90s to the early 2010s, it’s commonly met with all sorts of criticism today.

“People were like, ‘We did the process, why doesn’t our business transform?'” says Cliff Kuang, a UX designer and coauthor of User Friendly (and a former Fast Company editor). He points to PepsiCo, which in 2012 hired its first chief design officer and opened an in-house design studio. The investment has not yielded a string of blockbusters (and certainly no iPhone for soda). One widely promoted product, Drinkfinity, attempted to respond to diminishing soft-drink sales with K-Cup-style pods and a reusable water bottle. The design process was meticulous, with extensive prototyping and testing. But Drinkfinity had a short shelf life, discontinued within two years of its 2018 release.

“Design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market,” Kuang says. Take Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. “Jeff Bezos henpecked the original Kindle design to death. Because he didn’t believe in capacitive touch, he put a keyboard on it, and all this other stuff,” Kuang says. “Then the designer of the original Kindle walked and gave [the model] to Barnes & Noble.” Barnes & Noble released a product with a superior physical design, the Nook. But design was no match for distribution. According to the most recent data, Amazon owns approximately 80% of the e-book market share.

The rise of mobile computing has forced companies to create effortless user experiences—or risk getting left behind. When you hail an Uber or order toilet paper in a single click, you are reaping the benefits of carefully considered design. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies with the strongest commitment to design and the best execution of design principles had revenue that was 32 percentage points higher—and shareholder returns that were 56 percentage points higher—than other companies.

As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities.

Cities have lots of rules and regulation about how things can be designed and built, reducing the need for and value of creativity

The situation is similar in our field. In 2009, companies might ask a designer to “imagine the shoe-shopping experience on mobile,” and such a designer would need to marshal a considerable number of skills to do so: research into how such activity happens today and how it had been attempted online before and the psychology of people engaged in it; explorations of many kinds of interfaces, since no one really knew yet how to present these kinds of information on smartphones; market investigations to determine e.g. “what % of prospective shoppers have which kinds of devices, and what designs can accommodate them all”; testing for raw usability: can people even figure out what to do when they see these screens? And so on.In 2023, the scene is very different. Best practices in most forms of software and services are commodified; we know, from a decade plus of market activity, what works for most people in a very broad range of contexts. Standardization is everywhere, and resources for the easy development of UIs abound.

It’s also the case that if a designer adds 15% to a design’s quality but increases cycle time substantially, is another cook in the kitchen, demands space for ideation or research, and so on, the trade-off will surely start to seem debatable to many leaders, and that’s ignoring FTE costs! We can be as offended by this as we want, but the truth is that the ten millionth B2B SaaS startup can probably validate or falsify product-market-fit without hiring Jony Ive and an entire team of specialists.

We design apps downstream of how Apple designs iOS. There’s just not that much room for innovating in UI at the moment

Today, for a larger-than-ever percentage of projects, some good libraries and guidelines like Apple’s HIG can get non-designers where they need to go. Many companies could probably do very well with1 designer to do native design + create and maintain a design systemPMs and executives for ideationFront-end engineers working off of the design system / component library to implement ideasSo even where commodification doesn’t mean no designers, it still probably means fewer designers.

If, for example, they land AR / VR, we will once again face a world of businesses who need to figure out how their goods and services make sense in a new context: how should we display Substack posts in AR, for example? Which metaphors should persist into the new world? What’s the best way to shop for shoes in VR? What affordances empower the greatest number of people?

But there will at least be another period when engineers who “just ship” will produce such massively worse user interfaces that software designers will be important again.

“design process” and “design cycles” are under pressure and may face much more soon. Speed helps, and so too does a general orientation towards working with production however it’s happening. This basically sums to: “Be less precious, and try to fit in in whatever ways help your company ship.”

being capable of more of the work of making software can mean becoming better at strategy and ideation, such that you’re ever executive’s favorite collaborative partner; you listen well, you mock fast (maybe with AI), and you help them communicate; or it can mean becoming better at execution, learning, for example, to code.

Reddit is rumored to have plans to go public, but they need better leadership than the current team. Huffman has shown no leadership skills. He doesn’t know how to read the room. Most importantly, he lacks the social empathy to lead a social platform. Even more disappointing is the lack of comments or intervention from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, the always chatty — who seems to have advice for every other founder, except for his co-founder. […] In an attempt to monetize the content generated by the community, Huffman forgot that it is the people who make the platform. The community is the platform. It is something the owners of social media platforms forget. […] It happened with MySpace. It has happened with Twitter. It is now happening with Reddit. They never learn from past mistakes. They assume that because they own the platform, they own the community. Every time they forget that important thing, they erode the community’s trust. And once that trust goes, so does the unfettered loyalty. People start looking for options.

I have zero faith in Steve Huffman’s ability to lead Reddit. What kind of chief executive officer posts this comment after a massive community backlash?

closing off 3rd party API access mostly serves an IPO, not OpenAI. If Reddit merely wanted to restrict the ability to scrape its data, they could have done so without killing off clients – e.g. via licensing deals. However, perhaps if access to training data is seen as an elbows-out brawl, I could see how Reddit would be extremely protective of its data. I mean, lyrics websites, map makers, and dictionaries go to great lengths to protect their data. It would not be a giant stretch for Reddit to do so as well.

Huffman is right that, in the end, the whole situation reflects a product problem: the native Reddit apps, both on desktop and on mobile, are ugly and difficult to use. (In particular, I find the nested comments under each post bizarrely difficult to expand or collapse; the tap targets for your fingers are microscopic.) Reddit didn’t really navigate the transition to mobile devices so much as it endured it; it’s little wonder that millions of the service’s power users have sought refuge in third-party apps with more modern designs.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.

It’s not just a question of “how do we make this usable?” it’s more about “how do we make this usable for users and increase feature adoption which will drive more revenue?“

Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm’s structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns—yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.

This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive.

These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible.

Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

It creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

It’s easy to make data-driven design decisions, but relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure. Data is very useful for incremental, tactical changes, but only if it’s checked and balanced by our instincts and common sense.

It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.

Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness. You’ve optimized for something that’s objectively measured, at the cost of goals that aren’t so easily codified.

Design instinct is a lot more than innate creative ability and cultural guesswork. It’s your wealth of experience. It’s familiarity with industry standards and best practices.

Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.