Our design process
Our design process is deeply rooted in Design thinking – a human-centered approach to innovation. This process is anchored in understanding customer’s needs, generating creative ideas, prototyping, and validating assumptions. By using Design thinking, you make decisions based on what customers really want – this means that we rely on evidence instead of assumptions.
At the core of the Design thinking process, is a recurring pattern of creating and reducing options - this is called Divergent and Convergent thinking. It is best visualized by the Double Diamond, the Design Council’s framework for innovation. Having a clear visual pattern of the process, allows us to start by diverging- meaning creating new choices that don’t yet exist so that we can converge – choosing the best solution for the challenge at hand.
Design thinking brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable.
Diversion vs. Conversion
Design thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.
Each phase of this process either makes you diverge or converge.
Diverging phases (Discover & Develop)
Diverging phases require you to open up and take anything possible into account or develop as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.
Converging phases (Define & Deliver)
Converging phases require you to narrow down, get your ideas and approaches straight to make sense and decisions.
Stage 1 first diamond – Experience Strategy
The first two phases – Discover & Define – are all about «doing the right thing» (goal) and finding the right question to answer or the right problem to solve. This is when we talk about establishing an «experience strategy» (outcome).
Stage 2 second diamond – Experience Design
The following two phases – Develop & Deliver – are all about «doing things right» (goal) and finding the right answer or the right way to solve the problem. That’s when we talk about executing the «experience design» (outcome).
Discover – Research Phase
We gather information to understand the situation or problem. We step into our customers shoes in order to move beyond assumptions.
The problems we’re trying to solve are rarely our own, they’re those of particular users. In this phase, the goal is to develop a sense of empathy towards the people we are designing for. We want to gain insights and understanding into what people need, want, how they behave, feel, think and, why they demonstrate such behaviours, and feelings when interacting with our products and services. The best solutions come from the best insights into human behaviour.
Here are some sub-steps in the Research Phase:
- Analyse the initial problem and define what additional knowledge you need and how to obtain it
- Define your research scope, methods, prepare and plan your research
- Gather existing research
- Conduct your primary (field) and secondary (desk) research
- We need to uncover what is meaningful to them.
Output: Unstructured research findings, documentation, and findings.
Define – Synthesis Phase
We understand and make sense of our research to ensure that we are solving the right problem. We define a meaningful and an actionable problem based on our customers needs and their problem.
In this phase, the goal is to identify and understand the right problem before we can come up with genuine and innovative solutions.
When it comes to choosing which problem to tackle first, think about what would impact your product the most or what would bring the most value to your customers.
Here are some sub-steps in the Synthesis Phase:
- Lay out all the research findings and build themes and clusters to gain an overview
- Find insights – the dormant truth behind the facts or the words between the lines
- Surface areas of opportunity and potential actions
- Form redefined «How might we…»-questions based on the opportunity areas and challenges
Output: A final brief, a new or refined «HMW»-research question(s).
Develop – Ideation Phase
We get into the solution mode by first generating lots of ideas. We then converge by exploring a few ideas that are interesting, meet the project goal and kick start an experimental and iterative process.
Use the inspiration we have gathered to help us push past the obvious ideas to come up with fresh solutions to the problem. In this phase, the goal is to generate many ideas, to imagine lots possibilities, and create diverse solutions that meet the project goal. The key is to understand the problem, so you can build a hypothesis and find a solution that solves the core issues.
Here is a quick listing of the different sub-steps in each phase:
- Ideate – generate as many ideas or potential solutions as possible.
- Evaluate the first ideas you want to bring into further exploration.
- State a clear hypotheses
- Bring your ideas and the design vision to a tangible form.
Output: A set of ideas, a hypotheses, a concept, first design drafts, a vision or first prototypes.
Deliver – Implementation Phase
We find out if our concept is viable before we realize a solution. We do this through prototyping, testing and iterating.
We rely on prototyping to reduce uncertainty and to test the quality of the ideas. So bring ideas to users! In this phase, the goal is two fold. First, make your ideas physical to create experiences that your users can interact with. Build to think and learn. Secondly, test your prototypes to gather feedback and continue to learn about your users. The goal is to identify key aspects of your new service or product to see what works and what you can iterate on.
Here is a quick listing of the different sub-steps in each phase
- Prototype, Test & Analyse (make your best ideas tangible, test them and see what you get out).
- Learn, Iterate & Repeat (bring in the learnings, maybe rethink, redo, retest).
- Build, Iterate & repeat as often as necessary (the better the results get the more you bring your product to a real-world, usable and stable product).
- Release your solution and push it out to your users- keep learning
Output: Your final product or the solution and answer to your challenge.