For a good period of time, between like, 2014–2020, design was all about The Process. You know it. Yeah, that’s the one:

Instead of portfolios of mockups or prototypes, it was all these artifacts — journeys, flows, personas, user stories. Proof of the process.

And our output started looking more like this:

We stopped caring so much about the actual design of the thing — what people actually saw or felt when they used the thing we made. And we self-indulged in all the “practice of design”.