Intuition in design isn’t guessing

I’ve always struggled with how much weight some people give to process in design. Not because structure or workflow don’t matter, but because at some point they stopped being tools and started being something you’re expected to swear by.

That never felt right to me.

I was never excited by long, closed briefs that try to define everything upfront. I’ve always preferred talking to people instead. Sitting down, asking questions, understanding what’s actually broken, and discovering the solution along the way. I’m far more comfortable trying things and seeing what happens than debating what we might do in theory.

That’s also why I’ve always found one question super hard to answer:

What’s your design process? What’s your workflow?

Real work doesn’t move in clean steps. You notice something, talk to people, try a direction, adjust, and keep going. What matters is how someone thinks in those moments and how they decide when there’s no obvious right answer.

Whenever I tried to explain it that way, I naturally wanted to mention intuition. And more often than not, the reaction was tense. As if I had said something slightly forbidden. As if “intuition” automatically meant guessing, having no data, or being unorganized.

It often felt like a moment from The Big Short: “You’re betting against the entire market?” - that brief pause where conviction sounds indistinguishable from recklessness if you can’t immediately show the exact math.

I’ve seen how easily process can give weak ideas more weight than they deserve. Wrap almost anything in structured process, buzzwords, enough research, post-its, workshops, and A/B tests, and it suddenly becomes difficult to question. The idea itself doesn’t improve, but it gains authority.

If you care about a product and spend enough time working on it, you naturally build an understanding over time. You read feedback, talk to people, look at the data and dashboards, notice patterns, and form a map of how the product actually works. From that accumulated context, good decisions could emerge without needing a dedicated research phase for every single step forward.

That’s what you can call intuition.

Guessing is what happens without understanding.

Intuition is what happens because of it.