OP, you accidentally invented the design process that they teach in design school. You can officially call yourself a designer.

1) have a high level functional goal

2) be inspired and think of a motif

3) go wide within that motif and explore

4) narrow in on a single direction and iterate

5) fine tune the details until you are creatively satisfied and the design meets your goals from step 1.

I think, many of the folks commenting below, mentioning that the OP hasn't actually studied in a design program in school, also fail to mention that the attorney, and later U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln also had no formal education in learning to read.

The latter, in his path toward literacy, and eventually a J.D. (That's what attorneys are nowadays anyway) was largely due to his stubborn autodidactism, the same mettle that the OP himself chronicles and showcases in his blog.

If you put most people participating (or lurking) here on Hacker News through this scrutiny, you really shouldn't be surprised that this is generally the case with anyone who's been working in data processing, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, or WhatEv we're going to be calling it in the next decade.

Nowadays, when I think of n00bs, I don't think about the computer illiterate, I think about the motivated neophytes who spent two years grinding along in an IT track in college at the snails pace of semester courses and now they can consider themselves entry level python programmers with an extra semester where they took "Introduction to Java - CS-107".

If you're going to survive in this industry, you already have an insatiable curiosity for everything under the hood and morbid obsessions with break/fix - emphasis on 'fix' :)

If it looks like Yakko (the OP of this thread) went through two semesters (that really is a freakin' year in trad educational systems) of design school, but in reality really didn't... You would be wrong. He just did it on his own and at a pace he was comfortable with, arriving at the same dock to berth his ship as someone who actually spent a year being forced learn it at a snails pace.

Not everyone can be a network engineer, or a systems administrator, or full stack developer, etc., but those who thrive upon the work are almost always exceedingly autodidacts in those disciplines...

You literally cannot keep up with the pace of evolving technologies if you're doing so in a legacy educational institution.

Interview question: "Tell me about a nightmare scenario you were faced with when you were without the knowledge to fix the problem and yet, did so anyway - how and what did you do to rise to the occasion, and how did that make you feel like when everyone was back online again?"

It’s funny, this is exactly how I used opus to design an iOS app I’m building. Unfortunately fable was released and it seems my taste lines up with fable’s training quite a bit[1]. Now my app looks like ai anyway. You win some you lose some I guess.

[1] https://onda-cast.github.io/onda/

Yeah, and the trade-off here is that it takes time. In the same way, you can write insightful blog posts or work emails using AI if you maintain creative control, but all of sudden, you're not moving at 100x speed. You're moving a lot closer to human speed.

This trade-off is something I like the least about AI. In the time it takes someone to produce excellent results using AI without giving up control, people unconcerned with quality or style can produce 100x as much. So by the end of the day, your inbox or your social media feed is mostly slop.

That sounds like basic project management

I have never heard this, but I like it a lot.

I love the list, but the design process I taught in school was way different — it was a loop of two steps, started anywhere:

1. Do something. (Many of the five above seem nice! But there’s lots of methods that fit different tasks)

2. Ask some users please for the love of god! Show it to somebody! Get your mom’s feedback! Anybody!!!

Etc. It was drilled into me pretty hard at GaTech by their HCI prof, but perhaps he spent so much time reiterating it because it’s heterodox.

It doesn’t help that “design” covers everything from splash pages that sell SaaS to doors and blankets and stuff. I’m a little dubious of any single unified framework other than the aforementioned Frantic Dyad that could hope to cover all that space.