Probably on the same lines of the sibling comments, but here's my 2 cents. (I'm the design lead at software company, strong fronted dev background) I believe t

Probably on the same lines of the sibling comments, but here's my 2 cents. (I'm the design lead at software company, strong fronted dev background) I believe that design should never be a creative process — when it is it means you are improvising — and that's simply disrespectful of the users. Well, you can have some sparks of creativeness (which usually is just an insight finally coming together from different datapoints now connected) but the process that brings you there is analytical, cynical, cold and methodical. Explore the domain, document possibilities, group approaches and make comparisons. To answer OP's question: the problem is usually time. If you spend 2 weeks developing a feature, why would you think 2 hours are enough to design it? It would be like that Futurama episode where Fry writes a tv series episode script in hours and he's surprised that it lasts only 10 minutes.