The Differences Between Design Frameworks

Stef Walter alerted me to a LinkedIn post listing the following as the “top 10 design frameworks.”

• Design thinking
• User-centered design
• Double Diamond
• Lean UX
• Herbert Simon’s process
• DeepDive Methodology
• 3-Stage Design Thinking
• AIGA
• Human-Centered Design
• Collective Action Toolkit

Before we get into what the differences are (at a high level), let’s start with HCD, Human-Centered Design, somehow number nine on the above list.

Human-Centered Design

HCD is a user experience process focusing on including diverse target audiences in all phases and tasks of our work so that we are truly creating what best serves those audiences. This is the infographic I use:

My infographic is a straight line, but in reality, this is flexible and cyclical. After testing, we normally iterate, which would loop us back to improving information architecture, interaction design, and sometimes our content and/or visual design.

User-Centered Design is generally considered the same as HCD. Most, if not all, users are humans, so HCD applies to users, customers, partners, resellers, installers, and everybody who is human or can be a user, consumer, or customer.

HCD has ISO standards in ISO 9241 . This means it’s not loose, it’s not new, it’s not a “mindset,” and it’s not just a framework or method. HCD is seen as the ergonomics of software and human-system interaction . Researching and designing digital systems and software has its roots in industrial design, human factors, and ergonomics.

Spoiler alert: every UX or Design “process” or “framework” is a derivative of?HCD.

You’re evidently not somebody until you’ve taken HCD, made your own visualization, created catchy names for steps, and slapped your trademark symbol on it.

Double Diamond

is a memorable visual representation of HCD. Instead of looking at the phases of work, the double diamond looks at the intentions of different parts of the process:

• Discover: Understand people, contexts, tasks, and systems. This is typically generative research work.?
• Define: Now that we have done research, we can define problems and narrow the focus for our project(s).
• Develop: This isn’t software engineering’s definition of “develop.” This is about solving problems through design.
• Deliver: Test potential solutions, reject ones that fail, and iterate on ones that are working well but aren’t finished.

Double diamond doesn’t offer something different than HCD offers. It just uses lots of the letter D and a catchy visual to explain it another way. When double diamond is done well, you are doing all of the phases and tasks in HCD.?

Herbert Simon’s?Process

is something I’d never heard of before, and I am not sure how it ended up on this list. It appears to be a 1947 process about decision-making and not necessarily UX or Design. But it suggests three stages of decision-making:

1. Intelligence gathering — sounds like our research.
2. Design — invent, develop, and analyze.
3. Choice —compare the accuracy and efficiency of possible solutions, and choose the best one.

It predates HCD, but seems to be HCD explained in a simplified way.

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic?Arts)

appears to have a process with the following steps:

• Define the Problem?
• Learn?
• Generate Ideas?
• Design Development?
• Implementation

Again, another cousin of HCD. Research, develop ideas, test them out, and implement the best one. The AIGA document I found admitted this process was “not new.”

Lean UX

is boiled down to three main “steps”:

1. Think, defined as research and research artifacts, including mental models.?
2. Make, defined as wireframes, prototypes, hypotheses, and other design artifacts.
3. Check, including a variety of qualitative and quantitative testing methods.

Nothing new here, nothing invented. Lean UX is another derivative of HCD.?

Collective Action?Toolkit

This is from frog, a design agency, and they say it’s their take on design thinking. This means they know it’s a derivative of…

Design Thinking

When “design thinking” was coined many decades ago, the intention was to capture that “something” that the best Designers bring to their work. “Systems thinking” was a common term, so “design thinking” was born. It was originally associated with human factors, ergonomics, industrial design, and, in the digital age, HCD.

But the “design thinking” that comes to mind for most of us now comes from IDEO, who created their derivative in the early 2000s. While definitions and executions of design thinking vary, phases are usually:

• Empathize, usually through research.
• Define — the problem based on the research insights.
• Ideate — create ideas, brainstorm, and generate possible solutions.
• Prototype — create a prototype that you can test.
• Test — determine if your potential solution (in prototype form) is a good one and solves the defined problem well.

At some companies, these steps have the same names but are stripped down further in a speed over quality adventure. We’d rather go fast than do things well, so “empathize” becomes a step where, rather than obtaining new evidence and knowledge, we run with what we think we know. This affects “define,” which is now creating a problem statement based mostly or wholly on guesses and assumptions.

But design thinking in any form should look quite familiar. It’s another derivative of HCD. It’s not new, nothing invented.?

Design thinking could be the complete HCD process with rigor, depth, and the skill of specialists. Or it could be shortened, minimized, based on guesses, workshopped, or done by people without HCD skill, talent, or experience. You can’t be too sure what you’re getting when someone says “design thinking.”

3-Stage Design?Thinking

appears to not exist, strengthening my hypothesis that the original LinkedIn post was written by ChatGPT.?

One company boils design thinking down to three “steps”: Immersion, Ideation, and Prototyping. Immersion seems to include research and problem definition. Prototyping seems to include testing.?

Google says design thinking has three core principles: Empathy, Expansive Thinking, and Experimentation.?

A developer relations guy I found online says that the three stages of design thinking are invent the future (research and then define the problem), test your ideas (design, prototype, and test solutions), and bring it to life (select the best design and develop the final product).?

We have plenty of derivatives of design thinking, which is a derivative of HCD.?

Deep Dive Methodology

has five key phases:

1. Understand, mostly the market, your client, and tech constraints.
2. Observe, which is research.
3. Visualize, which are solutions and designs, preferably something new and innovative.
4. Evaluate, which is testing and iterating on prototypes.
5. Implement.

Sure sounds familiar.

What have we?learned?

• There are a variety of processes selling themselves as UX, Design, Innovation, Customer-Centricity, or another type of framework or process.
• They are all nearly identical.?
• They are all derivatives of Human-Centered Design (HCD).
• Some HCD derivatives have sub-derivatives, which, if not executed really well, might be quite far from good HCD work and outcomes.
• Derivatives might come with their own canvasses, templates, or suggested exercises, but at their core, and when done well, they are all the same process doing the same things in the same order.

The most important thing we can learn here is that it’s all about quality. No matter which framework or process you claim to do, if you aren’t giving skilled, qualified specialists enough time to do thorough and great work that sets every phase (and later implementation) up for success and great customer outcomes, then none of this matters. Steps don’t matter. Catchy diagrams don’t matter.?

It’s all HCD, and it’s all down to the quality you put into it. Put little effort, low quality, and lots of guesses into it, and you should expect poorer outcomes and results than more effort, higher quality, and knowledge derived from research.

Bonus: Does your company love love love one of these frameworks? Maybe design thinking?

Design thinking done well requires research, preferably observational research. Design thinking is not supposed to be a guess sandwich, where we guess at users, we guess at their problems or needs, and then guess what solutions might work for the guessed problems.

If your company loves one of these frameworks, use that to get buy-in on doing a customer-centric process well and thoroughly. You want design thinking? OK, but we must put real UX Researchers on projects (early) to answer questions and gather knowledge, setting our team and project up for success. Design thinking requires it! Empathizing demands it! IDEO would do it!?:)

Which one should you?use?

I tend to prefer the original. I didn’t love Oasis because we had The Beatles. I didn’t love Tori Amos because we had Kate Bush. Ya know??:)

I go for HCD 100% of the time. I don’t call it design thinking since design thinking has too many definitions, incarnations, and executions. I tell people about ISO 9241 so they will take HCD more seriously. I discuss and demonstrate the process’s quality and rigor, and its great outcomes for customer adoption, satisfaction, and retention.

The Best and Most Hilarious HCD Derivative

Endless cheers and hats off to Stéphanie Walter for her 2023 take on all of this, called “The Pentagram User Centric Design Process”:

Her steps are:

• Collect (their souls).
• Empathize (read their minds).
• Demoncratize (with “cratize” crossed out).
• Brainstorm (but “storm” is crossed out, and it says “eat their brain”).
• Feedback (but “back” is crossed out, and it says “feed the demon”).

Grab this design from her RedBubble shop .

Of course, it’s just another HCD derivative, but more overtly evil and clever.?

Delta CX is a full-service CX and UX agency and consultancy. We offer training, product and service strategy, and business change and business design consulting, including CX and UX research and design. We help businesses make and save money by improving teams, collaboration, processes, empowerment, agility, efficiency, and customer-centricity. Check us out at https://customercentricity.com .

Also please check out our new book, Customers Know You Suck. https://cxcc.to/ckys