Design process matters – here are three reasons why

Have you stopped to consider how your web service is actually designed and how design and development move together? Many teams assume the collaboration works smoothly, yet that is far from guaranteed. The industry still shows plenty of rigid and unclear practices that complicate work for both the client and the service provider.

A strong design process delivers a consistent user experience, clarifies project management and makes the entire workflow more predictable. You save time and money, but more importantly you gain a service that is easier to maintain and build on. At Druid, we have invested heavily in modernizing our design process so design, development and your business goals move forward in sync.

So what kind of process creates a genuine advantage? One that is agile, transparent and modern, producing these three key benefits:

1. Scalability

A contemporary design process builds the whole service around a design system. Instead of creating individual pages, we design the components that pages are made of. This keeps design and development aligned through shared component libraries and design tokens, reducing misunderstandings and speeding up delivery.

What’s the use of scalability? For one, the user experience of your web design will be consistent when the same components repeat throughout the service. A seamless and effortless user experience is a crucial factor in the digital world when you try to turn users into customers. Secondly, scalable design saves time and energy (and therefore costs), because you don’t have to design everything separately from scratch. This means more results with less trouble.

What about when you want to update the styles of your site? That is where a style guide comes into play. Style guides allow you to make site-wide style updates and to easily modify the styles of your components. And since all the changes are updated into all of the components at the same time, the consistency of the site’s styles can easily be maintained.

2. Cost-effectiveness

A strong design process keeps the work at the right level from day one. When design and development advance together, issues surface early and unnecessary over-designing is avoided.

Lightweight prototypes, early testing and AI-assisted validation help anticipate problems before they become expensive. The process ensures we design exactly what is needed, not what is nice to imagine.

We tend to create lightweight prototypes of the components we design before creating them for the actual system. This way you, as our client, get to give us your input at an early stage  – before modifications and changes are laborious and expensive.

3. Better basis for success

A well-structured design process creates a shared understanding of what we are building, why and in which order. You see how the design evolves, what kind of feedback we need from you and when decisions are made.

When everyone works with the same information, the project moves forward without surprises. Goals evolve naturally as we learn more about users and technical requirements. Transparency increases, timelines stay more realistic and collaboration becomes easier.

At Druid, every project starts with a design kickoff. Together with the client, we set goals, define success metrics and agree on how we work as one team. And as is fitting with the agile methodology, the goals and metrics may refocus or reform as the project progresses; the further the project develops, the more we learn and the wiser we become. 

As you can see, flexible and clearly defined design process can provide considerable advantages. How do we handle this in practice?

Contact us and we’ll tell you more!

Blog post updated 5.12.2025.