Researching Design Models
This week, Paul wants us to have a look at some design models in order to aid our process for the new project.
Design Council Double Diamond
The first model we were asked to look at was the Design Council Double Diamond model.
I have seen this model a few times (mainly when getting placement talks), and was always intrigued about how it worked. I went to the Design Council website to read about what it is, and how to use it.
The site included a downloadable image of the model, and I have included that here:
The Process:
The Design Council says that the two diamonds represent a process of exploring an issue more widely (divergent thinking), then narrowing in and taking more focussed action (convergent thinking).
Here is the process (taken directly from the site):
- Discover. The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.
- Define. The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you to define the challenge in a different way.
- Develop. The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.
- Deliver. Delivery involves testing out different solutions at small-scale, rejecting those that will not work and improving the ones that will.
The Design Council then goes on to outline and describe the core principles for problem-solvers to take on in order to find a solution effectively and efficiently. They are:
- Put people first
- Communicate visually and inclusively
- Collaborate and co-create
- Iterate, iterate, iterate.
I would always have considered these to be good principles to have when going into a UX project. UX is about people, and the best way to create a good product that will actually help users is to speak about it to others, and check that they have an understanding of your vision. Iterating, re-iterating, and testing over and over will allow for mistakes to be caught early, and this saves both time and money (as well as your sanity).
HCD Methodology
IDEO has a great method for Human Centred Design. In reading an article about it, I found it very interesting to see IDEOs process for creating human-centred design. This is an approach I always like to incorporate into my own designs, as all UX should be human-centred.
Here is the diagram IDEO supplied showing the six phases of their design process:
“When you understand the people you’re trying to reach—and then design from their perspective—not only will you arrive at unexpected answers, but you’ll come up with ideas that they’ll embrace.”
-IDEO
IDEO likes to gain empathy for the end-user of their products. They believe that, to find out what humans really want, you need to do two things:
- Observing user behaviour: Observe people in order to understand them. For example, if you’re designing a vacuum cleaner, watch people vacuum.
- Putting yourself in the situation of the end-user: You need to feel what the users feel in order to gain an understanding of what the user experience is really like.
Stanford School of Design
The Stanford d.School Design Thinking process is in five parts:
- Empathise
- Define
- Ideate
- Prototype
- Test
My first thoughts on this process is that the testing phase seems to come in a bit late, as it is important to also test your product before the prototyping stage. Will frequent testing, it makes it possible to catch any flaws a lot earlier in the design process. However, once I read through the entire process, I realised that their “prototype” phase was pretty much an iteration phase – and not just jumping to the high-resolution prototype and mockups then testing those, and only those.
Stanford d.School also outlines the what, why, and how for each of the five phases.
Empathise
What?
The empathise mode is the work you to do understand people. It is understanding human behaviour; how people do things and why.
Why?
Observing people’s behaviour and how they interact with the environment around them allows you to put yourself in their shoes and think/feel how they do. Good designs are built on a solid understanding of these beliefs and values.
How?
- Observe
- Engage
- Watch & Listen
Define
What?
The define phase is about bringing clarity and focus to your design. It is making sense of the information you’ve gathered from both user-research and other necessary research (looking at the subject matter, competitor analysis etc.).
Why?
This phase is essential because it results in your Point-of-View. This is the clear understanding (and statement) of the exact problem that you aim to solve. It allows you to take your findings, and turn them into insights. This will help you come up with better solutions.
How?
Look to the user-research, and any patterns that may emerge. Select a number of needs that you want to fulfil for these users. Then look to the insight you have gained from your research – base your point-of-view around these things.
A good point-of-view is one that:
- Provides focus and frames the problem
- Inspires your team
- Informs criteria for evaluating competing ideas
- Empowers your team to make decisions independently in parallel
- Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet
- Saves you from the impossible task of developing concepts that are all things to all people (i.e. your problem statement should be discrete, not broad.)
Ideate
What?
Ideate is the part of the design process where you concentrate on idea generation. This process includes coming up with many possible concepts and outcomes. Ideation allows for your creativity to flow in order to move forward with a couple of different ideas that may be good solutions.
Why?
Ideating progresses you from identifying problems to creating solutions. Ideation is where you can combine the understanding you have of the problem, and people you are designing for, with your imagination to create possible solution concepts. Ideating is important as it allows for you to have a wide range of possible solutions to choose from through user testing and feedback.
How?
Use your imagination, as well as the results from research, and ideate through mindmaps, brainstorms and sketches. The best thing to do in the ideation phase is not to judge your ideas too soon. Allow your creativity to flow first – then apply some rationality and reality later.
Come up with many ideas, and decide which ones may actually work the best, then judge those ones based on the research and results yielded.
Prototype
What?
Prototyping is where you can create basic visualisations of how the final product may look and work. You can create low-resolution prototypes and mock-ups in order to get useful feedback from users and colleagues.
Why?
Having someone actually interact with the work produced at this stage will allow you to gain valuable feedback, and observe how well they are able to interact with it. This will also let you see if the product will actually solve the problem or not.
You prototype in order to:
- Ideate and problem-solve
- Build to think
- Communicate
- Start a conversation
- Fail quickly and cheaply
- Test possibilities
- Manage the solution-building process
How?
- Start building. Even if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, the act of visualising the idea using things like post-its, tape, and found objects etc. will be enough to get your thinking going.
- Don’t spend too long on one prototype. Let go before you find yourself getting too attached to a single prototype.
- Identify a variable. Identify what’s being tested with each prototype. A prototype should answer a particular question when tested.
- Build with the user in mind. What do you hope to test with the user? What sorts of behaviour do you expect? Answering these questions will help focus your prototyping and help you receive meaningful feedback in the testing phase.
Test
What?
The testing phase is when you are able to solicit feedback about your prototypes from your users. This will allow you to gain empathy for the people that you are designing for, as well as an understanding of how they may interact with your product. Focus on what you can learn about the person and the problem as well as your potential solutions.
“A rule of thumb: always prototype as if you know you’re right, but test as if you know you’re wrong—testing is the chance to refine your solutions and make them better.”
Why?
To refine prototypes and solutions. Testing informs your next iterations. Sometimes this means starting over again, and looking to other ideas. The testing phase is also for learning more about your user. It is another opportunity to build empathy through observation and engagement. Testing will also be useful in refining your POV. Sometimes testing can show you that, not only did you not get the solution right, but also that you failed to frame the problem correctly.
How?
- Show don’t tell. Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or put your user within an experience, and don’t explain it.
- Let your tester interpret the prototype. Watch how they use (and misuse) what you have given them, as well as how they interact with it – then listen to what they say about it, and any questions they may have
- Create Experiences. Create your prototypes and test them in a way that feels like an experience that your user is interacting with, rather than something for your user to evaluate. Ask users to compare. Bringing multiple prototypes to the field to test gives users a basis for comparison, and comparisons often reveal needs.
Thoughts?
Overall, I found this research exercise to be very useful and insightful. It is cool to see just how many different design methods that are out there – but also how so many of the core values and principles are the same. All three of the methods researched tended to follow the same sort of process, one way or another, but my favourites were definitely the double diamond and IDEOs HCD. I’d like to try and use both of these methods at some point during this project – or in the future.
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