The Design Process That Survives Reality (And Why Most Don't)

What Makes a Design Process Actually Work

Walk into any design agency pitch and you'll hear the same claim: "We have a proven process." The uncomfortable truth? Most are just borrowed frameworks—design thinking processes and UX design processes that look impressive in decks but collapse under real-world pressure.

Here's what nobody tells you: you can't evaluate a process until you've lived through it. At Tennis, we've refined our design process for over a decade, long before the company existed. The result? Zero failed projects.

Why Most Design Processes Break

Good process isn't about control—it's about flexibility within structure. The design thinking process emphasizes creating frameworks that adapt when reality deviates from the plan. Because here's what nobody tells you in those pristine process diagrams: businesses are messy. Projects don't fail because the design work is bad or the ideas aren't innovative. Projects fail because of the logistical surroundings.

Someone goes on vacation during a critical review phase. A key stakeholder changes roles mid-project. IT wasn't invited to the table early enough, so now there are new technical constraints. A design team was working on a related side project, but no one drew the connections. These aren't edge cases—this is Tuesday.

A rigid UX design process breaks under this pressure. We've seen vendors whose inflexible processes spiral into chaos at the first deviation, leading them to nickel-and-dime clients. That's not a process problem—that's a philosophy problem.

The Reality Design Processes Must Survive

No project hits every milestone perfectly. Even the smoothest projects constantly deviate from the ideal path. This is "surviving reality"—the messy middle where all the human variables converge: schedule conflicts, shifting priorities, organizational politics, and most critically, new information that changes everything you thought you knew.

Scope as Hypothesis, Not Contract

Here's a fundamental principle most agencies won't admit: scope is a hypothesis, not a contract. When you sign a scope of work, you're not getting a rigid blueprint. You're buying activities designed to clarify what the actual scope should be. You can't fully understand what needs to be built without doing the discovery work. You're estimating based on limited knowledge.

The Funnel Principle: From Ideation to Final Product

The design thinking process follows a funnel approach. You start broad with discovery and user research, gathering information and narrowing possibilities. During the ideation phase, you generate ideas and explore possible solutions without constraint. As you move through research, strategy, and design, the funnel tightens. Each phase clarifies the next.

For especially complex projects where even the funnel is too wide to start, we use a double funnel approach. We'll run a Product Requirements Document (PRD) engagement first—essentially a smaller discovery project that narrows thinking before the main engagement begins. This document outlines what the product will do, who it's for, and how success will be measured. Sometimes we'll combine this with proof-of-concept work so stakeholders can see something working before committing major budget.

Core Components of a Flexible Design Process

Discovery & User Research: Understanding Users and Their Needs

We've lost count of how many prospects have told us, "I don't want to pay for discovery." Our response is always the same: then we're probably not the right fit for you. Skipping discovery is the single riskiest decision you can make in a design project.

Discovery isn't a luxury phase where designers navel-gaze about user personas. It's where you uncover the gaps between what you think you need and what will actually solve your problem. The research stage is essential for understanding users at a deep level. User research helps us understand real user needs and behaviors, while market research provides insights into industry trends and the competitive landscape.

The Product Requirements Document forces clarity early by answering fundamental questions:

• What are we actually building?
• Who are the users and what are users needs?
• What does success look like?
• What are the technical requirements and dependencies?

The HOLO Framework: A Design Thinking Approach

This is where the HOLO framework guides our thinking—our structured design thinking process for challenging assumptions:

Humans: Who are all the audiences—not just end users, but internal stakeholders, administrators, technical teams, executives who need to approve budgets? Understanding users means understanding this entire ecosystem.

Objectives: What does success actually mean? Not fluffy mission statements, but concrete, measurable outcomes. What's the ultimate goal?

Landscape: What's the technical environment? What are competitors doing? What exists today that we're building on or replacing? This includes interaction design patterns that users already understand.

Organization: What's the decision-making structure? What's the culture around change? Where are the political landmines? How do different departments interact?

This holistic view prevents the most common failure modes. Skip any dimension, and you're designing blind.

Decision Ownership & Governance

Here's where most processes fall into performative bureaucracy. They create elaborate approval chains that slow everything down and diffuse accountability. Good governance is about clarity: who makes which decisions, and when?

We establish clear decision ownership at the start. The design team plays a crucial role in ensuring responsibilities are well-defined throughout the UX design process. For high-level strategic decisions—overall direction, major feature inclusion, budget reallocation—we need the project sponsor. For tactical design decisions—specific UI patterns, content hierarchy, interaction design details—the product team has authority. For technical architecture—platform choices, integration approaches—the technical lead decides.

This clarity prevents the dreaded "while you're at it" trap. Our process gives project leads ammunition to push back diplomatically while maintaining the relationship.

Communication & Continuous Improvement

Good documentation tells a story. Your personas are the cast of characters. Your user flows are the choreography. Your wireframes are the stage. Your component system is the set design. When each piece clearly relates to the others, when you can trace a line from business objective through user need through design decision, the documentation becomes shared understanding that keeps everyone aligned.

We use regular check-ins focused on progress toward deliverables. These check-ins are valuable opportunities to collect and incorporate feedback from users and stakeholders, ensuring the design process continuously improves. And critically: we maintain the process itself. Every year, we review what worked and what didn't. This continuous improvement is the difference between cargo-cult process and living process that produces better outcomes.

Common Process Breakdowns (And How to Prevent Them)

The Vacuum Problem: When Stakeholders Disappear

Research consistently shows that lack of sponsor and stakeholder involvement are the top two reasons projects fail. The project kicks off with great fanfare, then the sponsor gradually withdraws, assuming the team has everything under control. This creates a vacuum. The design team starts making decisions that should belong to the sponsor.

Involving customers early and often in the design process helps ensure requirements align with actual customer needs. We've learned to treat stakeholder engagement as a risk factor from day one, building it into governance structures with required touchpoints and decision gates that can't be bypassed.

Process Theater: When the Design Thinking Process Becomes Performance

This is what we call process theater—impressive-looking methodologies borrowed from design thinking workshops or agile manifestos, but applied without understanding. Double diamonds that look beautiful in presentations but assume perfect information flow. Design sprint ceremonies that work great for software products but make no sense for complex B2B website redesigns.

The reality is that most teams can't hack these borrowed frameworks. They don't have the organizational maturity, the dedicated resources, or the cultural buy-in these processes require. Good process is flexible enough to adapt to project realities while maintaining core principles.

User Testing and Validation: Closing the Feedback Loop

One critical element that separates effective design processes from theater is how they handle user testing and validation. User testing isn't optional—it's how you validate that the possible solutions you've generated actually solve user problems.

The test stage should happen early and often. Create early prototypes and test them before investing heavily in final design and development. This catches fundamental misunderstandings when they're still cheap to fix. When you skip user testing, you're essentially guessing about whether your design works.

Implementation: Making Process Work for Your Organization

If you're evaluating design agencies or trying to improve your internal design process, focus on agencies that demonstrate process maturity through how they talk about adaptation and learning. The best partners aren't the ones reciting borrowed frameworks—they're the ones who can articulate why their process works and what they've learned from failures.

Essential components to demand:

Discovery work: Proper discovery might be standalone or the first phase of a larger project, but it cannot be skipped. This is where you define the problem clearly enough to solve it effectively.

Clear governance structure: Who makes which decisions? Who has final approval authority? These questions should have answers before work begins, not during a crisis.

Product requirements documentation: For anything beyond simple projects, you need a PRD or equivalent capturing not just what you're building, but why, for whom, and how you'll measure success.

Flexibility within structure: Your process needs to accommodate change without breaking. Look for agencies that explain how they prepare for the next stage while staying flexible.

When someone pushes back on process requirements, that's usually a sign they don't understand the value or have only worked with process theater. Good process creates better outcomes for everyone by reducing risk, preventing miscommunication, and ensuring the final design meets actual user needs.

The Hard Truth About Design Process

Process is something you earn through experience, not something you borrow from frameworks. You can study design thinking models and agile methodologies, but until you've run dozens of projects, weathered failures, and refined your approach, you don't have a mature process—you have a hypothesis.

This is why our process has been in development for over a decade, since before Tennis even existed as a company. Every project teaches us something. Every breakdown reveals a weakness to address. Every smooth delivery validates something we're doing right.

The hardest truth clients need to hear: follow the process. There's a reason each step exists. We've seen what happens when discovery gets skipped or governance gets loose. It doesn't work in anyone's favor.

But the process must earn that trust through transparency and demonstrable problem prevention. Process isn't the enemy of creativity or flexibility. Process is what makes creativity sustainable and flexibility strategic rather than chaotic.

Because at the end of the day, no project survives first contact with reality without a solid process—one tested, refined, and proven not in presentations, but in delivery. A well-tested design process is essential to achieving a high-quality final product that meets user needs and stands up to real-world demands.