Jared Spool in Design is the Rendering of Intent:

Over the last year, we’ve started explaining design as “the rendering of intent.” The designer imagines an outcome and puts forth activities to make that outcome real.

He believes this is one of the reasons why, even though they’re both government sites, We the People is so much better than the enrollment system for Global Entry:

There’s no technical reason why the We The People team had to end up with the design they did. It could’ve been frustrating and hard-to-understand, just like the Global Entry site or many other government web sites. The only reason either team ended up with these sites is because they came to their designs with different intentions. […]

Many of our design deliverables, such as wireframes, prototypes, and style guides, are as much about getting agreement on what we intend as they are to move our intentions closer to done. But the deliverables themselves do not produce the designs. It’s having all the people on the team, from the product managers through the developers, sharing the same intention.

We need to look at our design process as a way to come to a single intention as much as it is to make that intention real in the world. And it’s with the lens of this new definition that we can see we still have much work to do before every design will be a great one.

User intent is not a new design concept, but I like how Spool extends that to deliverables. Most deliverables are part of an essential process to get everyone to agree on the intent of the product, as well as the user intents that the product aim to deliver. Through this lens the right deliverables are closely related to Jobs to be Done, and therefore still very relevant and useful.