Most designers build polished artifacts before they understand the problem they are solving. Nielsen Norman Group calls this the deliverable trap: the reflex to format, label, and present work that was only ever meant to help you think.
The article draws a hard line between deliverables, research reports, annotated designs, task flows built for stakeholders and developers, and what it calls design disposables, rough artifacts made to externalize thinking, not to ship. The distinction matters because treating a thinking tool like a deliverable wastes time on polish and creates sunk-cost pressure to defend work that should have been thrown away.
The full piece is worth reading for how it frames the decision criteria: when to invest in craft and when to stay deliberately rough. If you have ever felt guilty scrapping a well-formatted document that never needed to exist, this is the framework you were missing.
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