Designing a design process – how to avoid the trap of linearity?
Welcome to Episode #3 of Fundament! If you want to step up your planning design processes game, this article will be very useful. Let's start, shall we?
In Episode #3 of Fundament, we are focusing on helpful tips for planning design processes. We will discuss why the ideal design process is a myth and how to plan your own flexible and bulletproof design process without falling into the trap of linearity.
What is waiting for you in this newsletter:
👻 Mythbusters debunk the myth of the ideal design process
🔥 Four tips to consider when planning design processes
🔗 Resources about design processes
🛠️ And a brand new segment – Tool of the week!
Ready? Let’s begin!
The myth of the ideal design process
Most designers on planet Earth have their own design process. Some are well thought out, formalized, and established, while some probably do not exist on the paper yet, rather being a routine. Over the years, you have probably seen various design processes from other designers and design agencies that tend to brag about these as a part of the offering. And I’m pretty sure you were asked to describe yours in a design job interview at least once. Or better – you were asked to imagine and describe the ideal design process.
But does the ideal design process even exist? Spoiler alert – it does not. Let’s find out why and what you can do about it.
If you’ve searched for the design process in Google, it’d most likely return something similar to this:
Empathize – understand what the needs of your users are, what they are struggling with, and what their pain points are.
Define – make a clear statement about the problem your users are facing and that you are about to resolve based on the data from the first step.
Ideate – brainstorm possible solutions to the problem you just stated. Try to come up with more than one idea, and don’t stick to the first one – it’s usually wrong.
Deliver – turn the idea into an actual product or at least an interactive prototype. It could be just an MVP and doesn’t have to include all the possible functionalities.
Test – validate your prototype on the battlefield with your users. Observe how they use it and turn those insights into an improvement plan.
Repeat
It’s pretty much what Double Diamond advises on the design process. It all sounds straightforward, but the reality might be a little bit different.
The design process in real life is never linear, which most online resources may suggest. They look like a list of things you tick off one after another.
But your product will evolve over time. Your users will change, as well as their needs. It’s almost impossible to discover all user’s needs at the beginning.
You will be doing activities you haven’t initially included in your game plan. Something will always go wrong. There will be many U-turns. And you won’t be doing things in the order you originally thought you would.
I’m far from hating Design Thinking or Double Diamond and other really smart and thoughtful tools. My point is that you can’t just take these processes out of the box, start using them, and don’t expect any problems on the road. On a positive note, they at least show the right direction, so you won’t build a prototype first and then define the problem you are trying to solve with this prototype.
So, how do you plan a design process without falling into the trap of linearity?
Tips on planning design processes
When planning any design work, keep in mind the obstacles I mentioned earlier. What’s incredibly important about planning design processes is anticipating risks and not looking too far into the future. Every step in your process depends on the results of the previous ones, which almost never can be accurately predicted.
Here are the four things you should consider when planning a design process:
Set clear goals
Be precise about methods and tools
Estimate time roughly
Anticipate potential risks
Set clear goals
Before you dive deep into work, think about the outcome. What is the goal of this project? Are you going to improve a specific functionality in the system that your users have problems with? Maybe you need to design a new flow that hasn’t previously existed in the system, but research tells you there’d be a demand for it? Or were you assigned to work on a totally new application, and you will be starting from scratch?
Each outcome requires different steps, methods, and resources. Here’s the first takeaway of design process planning – there’s no single design process that would do the trick for all types of work.
UX researchers would probably hang me for this, but you don’t need to do the research every time. It doesn’t have to be extensive in each case. What I observed when working with junior designers who had just gone out of university or design boot camp is they want to treat each project equally and use all methods they were taught. However, each project is different and requires some tailoring of the process to make it work.
Be precise about methods and tools
When you know what the desired outcome of your project is, you can start considering potential steps needed to fulfill the goal. Let’s consider user research. Do you need to do it? What kind of research? What methods will you use? What tools do you need? Where will you recruit participants? What should happen after it’s done?
Start by answering these questions, and don’t worry too much if you don’t know all the answers yet. The list doesn’t have to be perfect. As I wrote earlier, you can’t predict the results of each step, and future steps depend on these heavily. However, it would be nice to anticipate the potential costs of tools and external services you will be using, such as a recruitment agency for your research or a new, pricy data analytics tool.
At this stage, your plan will be quite rough but will already show your team and stakeholders the direction. To make them relatively happy and relaxed about the project, you need two more things in your plan: time estimation and risk anticipation, so they know how long it might take, how costly it will be, and what can go wrong.
Estimate time roughly
This one is specifically tricky. How do you estimate the time needed to complete each step in the process and actually not miss the deadline? You can’t, at least with high precision. Something can always go wrong. There will be some delays on the way. You will most likely underestimate the time. That’s why you do it roughly.
Considering an initial user research phase, we could break it down into the following pieces:
One day for writing the interview script
A week for recruiting participants
A week for executing interviews
Two days for consolidating feedback and writing a report.
Which in total gives two weeks and three days. What should you put in your plan? At least three weeks, if not even four.
The more experienced you get, the more you know how to do proper time estimates. If you are just starting out, you most likely see the world through rose-tinted glasses. Junior designers tend to underestimate time because they are not yet good at anticipating risks. Let’s get better at it.
Anticipate potential risks
We all love to see when things go smoothly in the project. But it shouldn’t be a surprise when I say it’s all just wishful thinking. Let’s consider the user research we just planned and estimated. Wouldn’t you be happy to have the report completed after three weeks and start the next step in your process? That’s your plan, right?
But what if recruiting participants has taken longer than a week because you looked for people so specific that it required more time to find and recruit them? What if a participant didn’t show up at the interview, and you need to look for a replacement? And what if you found out these interviews were not enough and you still don’t know everything to proceed with the project?
Anticipating obstacles early might reduce stress or even save the project. People get discouraged when things don’t go as they were originally planned. Try to think about what can go wrong and how big a delay it might cause to your plan while making it.
Further reading
Here’s a bunch of useful resources to deepen your knowledge about the design processes and planning of them:
The Double Diamond: A universally accepted depiction of the design process from Design Council: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/archive/articles/double-diamond-universally-accepted-depiction-design-process
What is Product Design and the Product Design Process by Gloria Lo: https://uxplanet.org/what-is-product-design-and-the-product-design-process-41b41a5bf795
Improving the Double Diamond Design Process by Andy Budd: https://medium.com/@smashingmag/improving-the-double-diamond-design-process-c28b782e03f4
Tool of the Week
Pickle
With this free tool, you can use the power of the design community to make decisions for your visual design and copywriting. Simply post two options that you can’t choose between, and you will get instant feedback from other designers on the platform. Bear in mind that Pickle will not replace traditional A/B testing or data analytics in your product but can be very useful in the early stages of the design process and other scenarios.
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