A Good Design Process
(This post is focused on the Design process for digital applications, as that is where my experience lies)
In a previous post, I touched briefly on several topics in Design. While writing that post, I realized that I wanted to share some thoughts about what a good Design process is.
The Value of Design Process
There is no genius designer that is able to jump straight into a project and design the right thing every time. They may be able to achieve aesthetic excellence, but there’s no guarantee they’ll create something useful or meaningful.
A design process enables two things:
- A shared approach on how to find and solve problems
- A framework to evaluate ideas, inform priorities and prevent myopic work
Design processes allow for a common vocabulary. A common vocabulary to describe the progress and status of design allows people to understand the context more easily. Understanding context allows for better feedback, which is the most important thing to produce awesome, meaningful work.
Products (especially mature products) are complex ecosystems. Designing for significant change requires massive amounts of coordination across almost every part of a company, from Data Science to Marketing. A reliable process helps this coordination, by allowing to designers to provide reasonable estimates of where they are in terms of delivery.
I’ve had the luxury of working with some amazing designers, both in the past and currently. The best have shared a common trait — they all adhered to a Design Process. The details of the process will change with every project, it will evolve over time and it’s flexible. But the core tenets remain.
Aside
In many small companies that have ‘start-up’ culture, process is a loaded word. It evokes imagery of corporate stuffiness and rigid, unyielding steps. Instead, I like to think of processes as organizational habits. Be deliberate about the habits you cultivate, as you are forming habits anyway.
What’s a Good Design Process?
Most good design processes share one common theme — as time progresses, inputs are narrowed and solutions are explored and elaborated upon. This is called Laseau’s funnel. The representation below is from Bill Buxton’s excellent book, Sketching the User Experience. In the beginning you have a breadth of many ideas with little exploration or substance. As you continue to learn more, you start eliminating some options, while the remaining ideas undergo more and more scrutiny.
Here is a slightly different representation of Laseau’s Funnel, which separates the funnels and may be easier to understand.
Elaboration
In the beginning, you want to take as many inputs as possible to help understand and define the problem. While doing research and sketching, you often pursue many ideas that you discard. This is extremely important because through iteration and the adjacent-possible, the best idea is usually surfaces.
Reduction
At some point, you need to start evaluating your ideas and reducing them until your arrive on the concept that will be built. At times this process is easy, as you are able to conclude certain ideas don’t make sense with more information. Other times, these are difficult decisions, that are nuanced and come with concessions. Do research before starting to reduce your ideas. You want to be sure you’re understanding the problem before solving it.
The best way to Elaborate and Reduce towards a solution is by getting constant feedback. Don’t move through a stage without sharing.
A Design Process
Research
Research is the most important part of any Design process. The facts and insights you acquire during the Research phase inform every subsequent part of the design process. More importantly, it is during research that you can easily kill ideas. Once pixels are shed, tunnel vision occurs.
Research should be thorough — both quantitative and qualitative. Research is not going to solve all your problems. However, research will allow you to understand the intricacies of the problem, which will inform the solution.
Research allows you to understand the complexity and immediacy of the problem you face. Having this context allows you to create a tentative plan and will guide you in determining which activities and deliverables you should pursue.
Most importantly, research determines whether or not you are even solving the right problem. Namely, are you solving a need for your current or potential customers?
You may have amazing technology, a killer marketing team and all the funding in the world, but if you are not solving a user need, you aren’t doing anything.
Things you do and make
Data Analysis, Competitive Analysis, User Interviews, Expert Interviews, Card Sorts, Design Brief, Design Timeline, Facts & Insights, User Personas, Business Model Canvas
Elaboration
Everything should be elaborated at this point. All ideas are encouraged.
Reduction
Feedback during the research phase is usually focused on the approach in gathering facts and insights gleaned from research activities. This is the Age of Ideas, so reduction is not encouraged.
Experience
The Experience phase of Design process involves taking the insights and facts from the Research phase and applying them into potential solutions.
It is much cheaper to change or iterate in low-fidelity. Some Designers prefer to jump straight into code or Photoshop. Where appropriate, this should be avoided. When viewing high-fidelity designs, we often are unable to separate the core concept from the execution. You still want to make sure the idea stands on it’s own, with no assistance from familiar patterns or pleasing aesthetics. Limit initial sketches to post-its or other small pieces of paper.
Things you do and make
Brainstorming, Sketches, Wireframes, Prototypes, Sitemap, User Journey, User Testing
Elaboration
Most elaboration happens during the Experience phase. As you are iterating in low fidelity, you’re able to spin up a lot of ideas. These ideas will spur questions and other ideas, which will lead to concepts that have more details. The key to this elaboration is creating a lot and getting a lot of feedback. Share early, share often and keep creating.
Reduction
Feedback is extremely important during the Experience phase. You’re able to quickly evaluate ideas without significant sunk cost. Exploring ideas will allow you to see untenable or that have less merit.
Build
After you and your team have explored different concepts and arrived on a finalized idea, it is time to build.
If the Design is relatively contained, you may already have a pattern library you can reference, which may make a lot of the Design decisions at this phase much easier. If it’s an entirely new feature or feature set, you’re going to need to allocate time for the creation of new patterns, interactions and elements.
In some instances, it might be helpful to create high fidelity comps to help facilitate feedback and reviews before creating digitally. For others, jumping straight into code to create is easier and faster. Both approaches have their merits, but for those who can design or prototype in code, you will get closer to the truth (with multiple screen sizes and browsers).
Remember to make the thing beautiful and fast. Then test it thoroughly.
Things you do and make
Layouts, Iconography, Assets, Code, Interactions, Device Testing
Elaboration
When you are building, you should have a narrowed down concept (or concepts), so Elaboration is extremely important. You’ll need to elaborate all aspects of the design, including edge cases. This will be real and will go out to your users, so considering all aspects of the design is extremely important.
Reduction
Reduction is a bit easier at this point. The focus is on the execution of the concept versus validating it. At this point, you should feel comfortable that idea you are working on has some merit, so you’re able to figure out the best way to do so.
Analyze
At this point, you have created a concept and released it to the wild (your users). You can analyze the success of the Design against the original design goals and customer need.
The goal is to Build upon what you created. Design is never done, there’s always an opportunity to continue to refine and optimize.
Things you do and make
Retrospective, Analysis
Reduction
At this point, your idea has been reduced to something that your customers are using. There is an opportunity to kill any feature bloat if you can clearly see something isn’t working.
Elaboration
The Analyze phase is the time where you are able to truly see what your design does. You move away from assumptions towards validation. This is a fantastic opportunity for learning. You can see adoption and behavior from real users, which is the most meaningful feedback you can get. From there you can build and iterate to improve your product.
