The Peaks and Valleys of Implementing A Design Process

You are starting a new project. The first thing that goes through your mind, after the overbearing anxiety of actually starting a project, is the steps in which you will go through to get the job done. Whether you are seasoned designer in the field or just starting out, you have mostly come across someone talking about the design process.

Fortunately, throughout the past couple of years, the process in which I work has evolved greatly. It opened my eyes to common mistakes and how to avoid them. Let me take you on a journey through the valleys, i.e. mistakes & misconceptions, and peaks, i.e. solutions & highlights, of implementing a design process.

The Right Fit

By definition, a process is a series of actions/steps taken to achieve something. It’s naive to assume that there is only one design process. This misconception is due to the surging popularity of the design thinking process. An approach established by the success of IDEO’s five phases of the design process and Stanford d.School’s five hexagons.

As revolutionary as this approach is, it doesn’t suit all projects and contexts. We struggle to put it to action sometimes and then blame it on tight deadlines, budgets or incompetencies. When in fact, it might very well be the case that the design thinking process wasn’t the right fit for your project in the first place.

Other examples for design processes are Google Venture’s Design Sprint created by Jake Knapp and The British Design Council’s Double Diamond. Design Sprint is ideal for validating new ideas quickly while keeping all team members engaged in the process. Double Diamond helps in exploring an issue deeply (divergent thinking), and establishing a focused action plan (convergent thinking).

It’s also a common misconception to stick to one process throughout the product development cycle. As the product evolves, the state of your problem/solution changes which requires a change in the process as well. Design is not a one-size fits all and its process is no exception.

The Process Anatomy

In order to create the right process for the current context, we have to understand the anatomy of a process: Elements - Stages - Tools.

Elements - What is the expected outcome

Defined by Jesse James Garrett in the framework Elements of User Experience: site objectives and user needs, content, information architecture, interaction design and visual design.

In our community, a lot of designers associate UX design with just creating fancy and good looking wireframes/interfaces. Other elements of the interface are overlooked and rarely mentioned in designers’ presentation of their final work.

Stages - what is the approach?

In which you decide which process to use. This depends on the clarity of the problem statement and the time allocated. We have already mentioned three famous processes: design thinking process, design sprint and double diamond.

Tools - what do we use?

A set of tools and methods that you use throughout the design process. There is no fixed set but rather you optimize your tools for the currently allowed resources. You could be implementing the design thinking process but you shouldn’t implement it the same way in every project. There are a plethora of user research techniques, you won’t need to use all of them, and depending on the context, you won’t be using the same ones every time.

Many designers are told to follow the process and treat it as law. When in real life, being flexible is key to survive the onslaught of the unknown. There are always going to be tight deadlines, not enough resources for research, stubborn clients and so on which all make it so much harder to follow any step-by-step process. It’s about knowing when to use which method and how.

The Spaces

Regardless of which process you’re following, designers have to juggle between two spaces: the problem space and the solution space. In the problem space, you research and understand. This applies to the users, the problem to be tackled and the business. Focusing on one more than the other will yield a misinformed problem statement which is based on partial truth.

In the solution space, you ideate and validate. Based on the problem statement established, designers will proceed to create a concept, prototype it and then test to validate it. Most of the issues we face are rooted in solely jumping directly to the solution space without a proper problem statement.

I use the following questions as a starting point to defining the problem:

• What is your business value proposition?
• What problem does your product resolve?
• What are the user’s goals?
• What are their pain points?
• What is your competitive advantage?
• What do you do better than anyone else?
• Is there a competitor that you admire most? If so, why?

In my experience, most of the clients don’t have proper answers to some of these questions, especially the one related to the users. This is due to the success of the offline business model. They think transitioning to digital space is just coding up a website and publishing it. And in the cases that the client has done market research, they are usually focused on demographics for marketing insights and not enough data for UX design.

Someone Else’s Shoes

“We spend a lot time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people who are crossing it”

This statement by Dr. Prabhjot Singh highlights a big gap in our work. A user-centric design process has proven again and again to be at the heart of creating successful products. For example: when Bank of America undertook a user-centred redesign of its account registration, online-banking traffic increased by 45 percent (mentioned in The Business Value of UX by Jim Ross)

A lot of designers skip the user research phase because they simply don’t enjoy it and would rather work on creating the visual interface. Clients will also encourage this behavior since this means less time taken to produce the final output. However, we have reached a point where users simply don’t use bad experiences. Good-looking-only designs will eventually fail to converse and convert customers, forcing us to revisit the entire product to be able to take users' input into consideration.

Integrating user research into the process after working without it for years is a daunting task. It’s overwhelming and downright discouraging when you think about how and when you will meet with participants. I have learned that starting out with informal research is a great way of overcoming the initial shock.

Working in an agency, the frequency of which we do new projects is very high. This means that most of the user research required is qualitative research. It doesn’t require a big sample of participants so you can easily interview 5-10 participants and still get valid insights. Being prepared, practicing interviewing and learning from your mistakes during the informal research will help you greatly when you are doing interviews with actual users.

Include Everyone

Whether you work in a team of designers, developers or on your own, you should always strive to receive feedback. Some designers only respect other designers’ feedback and downplay clients’ and developers’. Truly listening to everyone’s feedback is a very valuable skill. That is by trying to understand the motive behind it, the “why”. If the feedback didn’t make sense, the “why” probably will.

Preceding prototype presentations with the process, different steps and output of each step helps greatly in communicating your thought process and how that prototype eventually came to be. Once I started sharing research insights, the quality of the feedback I received increased exponentially.

One key item to present is user flow. Often we get engrossed in the screens of the prototype and the details and lose track of the bigger picture. It’s also important to visit this flow more than once rather than creating and shelving it. Aligning a bird-eye view of the experience with everyone will make it less possible to miss any flaws in it.

It’s very important to have a shared vision with everyone, client, stakeholders, designer, developers and project managers. User flows help in communicating this vision visually which makes the discussion more efficient. With common goals in all minds, there will be less conflict and more fruitful conversations.

The Takeaway

• There is no one step-by-step guide process that you can follow
• You need to be flexible and create the right fit for each project
• Put more focus on the problem space before jumping into the solution space
• User research is a key activity of the design process. Informal research can help introduce the activity into your process without spending too much time or effort
• Listen to feedback carefully and have a discussion around it. Sharing a common vision is key to having fruitful discussions.
• Include everyone in the process and align on a common vision.

If you want to know more about UX design practices and our design process at robusta, contact me via Linkedin or send me an email on [email protected] and let’s talk about it.

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