What Is and What Is Not Disruptive or Innovative Design?

You cannot ask a design team to transform your business while only giving it permission to change the interface.

“Your design is not disruptive enough.”

If you work in product design, you may have heard some version of this feedback. Perhaps you looked back at your work and wondered: what, exactly, would make it disruptive?

A more unusual layout? Bolder typography? An interaction nobody has seen before?

Before opening another Figma file, ask the person giving the feedback a question:

“What do you want to change for the customer that our product does not make possible today?”

The answer will tell you far more than the word disruptive ever could.

Sometimes, they simply want a fresher interface. Sometimes, they want a better product. Sometimes, they want an entirely different business.

Those are very different briefs.

What are we actually asking design to disrupt?

Disruption, innovation and visual novelty are often bundled together as though they mean the same thing.

They do not.

A product can look unfamiliar while preserving every frustration of the existing experience. Another can use entirely familiar design patterns while making something dramatically easier, cheaper or more accessible.

Imagine a bank redesigning its account-opening journey.

One approach gives the application a contemporary visual identity, cleaner forms and polished transitions. Customers still need to visit a branch, bring documents and wait for approval.

Another approach questions why a branch visit is necessary, which information genuinely needs collecting, how identity can be verified remotely and when a customer should be able to start using the account.

Both involve design. The second changes much more of the service.

Even then, a better account-opening experience does not automatically amount to market disruption. That depends on the wider offering, who it serves and how the business competes.

“Innovative”, “better” and “disruptive” are not interchangeable measures of design quality. A useful improvement does not need to disrupt an industry to deserve investment.

When a business problem becomes an interface brief

Consider a familiar situation.

An established company notices a smaller competitor winning customers. The newcomer appears faster, simpler and more responsive. Leadership looks at its product, sees a modern interface and concludes that the design team needs to produce something equally disruptive.

But the interface is only the part they can see.

Behind it may be a different pricing model, fewer approval stages, a narrower product focus, faster implementation or a service that removes work customers previously had to do themselves.

The established company asks for new screens while keeping its existing processes, incentives and commercial assumptions intact.

Then it wonders why the redesign has not changed its competitive position.

A design team can expose those constraints, demonstrate alternatives and help shape a different offering. It cannot independently authorise changes to pricing, operations, policy or company strategy.

The ambition and the authority have to meet somewhere.

The banking example: would you approve the experience you want?

Suppose your design team proposes an account-opening journey that customers can complete remotely in minutes.

The prototype looks excellent. Leadership is enthusiastic.

Then the questions begin.

Can identity checks happen remotely? Can existing systems support the journey? Which checks are legally required, and which reflect internal policy? Who owns exceptions? Will teams accept a different approval process?

These are legitimate questions. Answering them is part of creating the product.

The problem starts when every existing process becomes an unquestionable constraint, while the design team remains accountable for delivering a radically different experience.

Security, compliance and operational concerns need expertise and careful judgement. They also need colleagues willing to investigate alternatives together.

If the organisation cannot change any of the conditions producing the current experience, it has already limited what the redesign can achieve.

Before asking whether your designers can imagine a better service, ask whether your organisation is prepared to deliver it.

1. Give design a role in defining the product

Some companies involve designers after the consequential decisions have already been made.

The problem has been defined. The requirements are approved. The workflow is fixed. Development is scheduled.

Design is then asked to make the result intuitive, attractive and, occasionally, disruptive.

There is still valuable work to do at that stage. But the opportunity to question the product has narrowed considerably.

Product design involves understanding people’s needs, deciding which problems deserve attention, exploring possible solutions and testing whether those solutions work. Visual and interaction design bring those decisions into an experience people can use.

If you want design to influence the offering, involve designers while the offering is still open to influence.

2. Match responsibility with decision-making power

Hiring a design leader does not, by itself, make a company more innovative.

That person needs access to customers, a role in product and business decisions, and colleagues who can help turn findings into action.

Otherwise, the organisation has recruited someone to identify problems it has no mechanism for resolving.

Look at how decisions actually happen. Who can challenge a requirement? Who can commission research? Who can stop a weak idea? Who can approve a change that crosses departmental boundaries?

Those answers reveal more about your capacity for innovation than the titles on your organisation chart.

3. Make design part of leadership practice

Calling a company “design led” is easy. Making room for design in consequential decisions requires commitment.

It means customer evidence can change the roadmap. It means teams have time to test assumptions before committing to delivery. It means leaders will reconsider a preferred solution when the evidence points elsewhere.

It also requires strong partnerships across Product, Engineering, Design and the wider business. Designers do not hold a monopoly on good ideas, and a compelling concept still needs technical, operational and commercial judgement.

The point is to give design a meaningful voice in shaping what gets built and why.

4. Replace vague ambition with a concrete problem

“Be more disruptive” gives a team very little to work with.

Try asking:

• What are customers struggling to achieve?
• What work are we making them do unnecessarily?
• Which assumptions are we prepared to challenge?
• What would a meaningful improvement look like?
• What are we willing to change beyond the interface?

These questions create a brief people can investigate. They also make leadership’s expectations more accountable.

A team can test whether customers complete a task more easily, understand a decision or gain access to a service previously out of reach.

It cannot meaningfully test whether a screen feels “disruptive enough”.

Dear managers,

It is reasonable to expect your design team to challenge assumptions, uncover opportunities and imagine better ways of serving customers.

Give them the scope, partnerships and authority to pursue those opportunities. Be prepared to question the business decisions that shape the experience.

And be precise about what you want to achieve. Sometimes the right answer is a clearer interface. Sometimes it is a redesigned service. Sometimes it requires changing the business itself.

If your ambition reaches beyond the screen, your brief and your willingness to change, must reach beyond it too.

Your friend,
Yusuf Hassan