Ask IH: Which part of your design workflow eats the most time? Looking for insights
Hey Indie Hackers 👋
We've been exploring different design workflows while improving our own tool, Sketchflow, and one question keeps coming up: Which stage of the design → prototype cycle slowyou down the most?
Based on your experience, which one is the real time sink?
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Concepts & Wireframing
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Interactions & Prototyping
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Feedback Loops & Iteration
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Responsive Layouts
I'd also love to understand why that stage takes so long for you:
Is it tooling? Communication? Rework? Ambiguous requirements? Something else?
We're currently trying to solve some of the "design-to-prototype speed" pain points inside Sketchflow.ai (like generating multi-page flows quickly and reducing repetitive layout work).
Your real experiences and feedback will help us understand this space more deeply and spark new ideas on how we can improve this part of the workflow.
I'll summarize the poll results and insights in a follow-up post, and hopefully feed them into our next iteration.
Looking forward to hearing your experiences! 👀💬
As someone who designs assets for Reddit campaigns, the biggest slowdown is feedback and iteration. Every subreddit has its own style, so even small layout changes can trigger multiple redesigns. It’s not the tools it’s aligning visuals with community expectations. Anything that speeds up those micro-iterations would be a huge win.
Great question, Fan and honestly, love how you’re approaching this. 👌
It’s refreshing to see a team digging into real workflow bottlenecks instead of guessing from the outside.
For me, feedback loops & iteration are the biggest slowdown by far. Not because of the design tools, but because of the back-and-forth: unclear requirements, shifting inputs, and having to update multiple screens just to reflect one tiny change. That’s where momentum dies.
The real time is spent on understanding how the organisation and it's products can communicate naturally with people in the target market, the design language that informs the interfaces which improve life for actual and potential users.