Double diamond — Design Thinking
When we talk about design thinking many models came to our mind, but the Double diamond is the most famous of them. How it’s work? Well, Double Diamond is the name of a design process model popularized by the British Design Council in 2005 that split the process into four phases:
- Discover — The process starts by questioning the challenge and quickly leads to research to identify user needs.
- Define — The second phase is to make sense of the findings, understanding how user needs and the problem align. The result is to create a design brief that clearly defines the challenge based on these insights.
- Develop — The third phase concentrates on developing, testing, and refining multiple potential solutions.
- Deliver — The final phase involves selecting a single solution that works and preparing it for launch.
We can use this framework for many different scenarios. Here I can show you some:
- for an initial assessment of project type and the approach needed to address a specific challenge
- to facilitate a conversation around a number of projects, to help decide on their priority in terms of relationship, stage, or approach
- as a tool to help focus teams at the start of a project
- as a method for starting to shape the strategy and management of a project
- to check in on a project in terms of ‘where we are in the process
- to help people get comfortable with ‘going broad and unfocused’ in both of the divergent Discover and Develop phases
Discover
The first phase is the discovery, here we can use many tools and approaches to find the most information possible about the theme. Some tools that I like to use in this step are Desk research, CSD Matrix (Certainties, Suppositions & Doubts), Shadowing, Quantitative research, and if possible, Interview with users to learns and observe some new aspects.
Here I would like to show a short description of these tools to help you in the process of choosing one that is the best for your goal.
PS: On the internet, you can find infinite tools and ways to reach your goal, não get stuck in these options because which project is different and have different needs.
Desk research
Desk research is about immersion in the theme. You use the internet to find information in different fonts to understand a little more about your subject. If your project is e-commerce you need to understand the customer behaviour and who is the interface of the other marketplaces.
CSD matrix
It’s a method invented by Livework Tools that help with “false certainty”. Calm down, I can explain. When you do the desk research or think about a usual subject, you get certainty, assumption, and sometimes doubt. So, in a design project, you should not have a bias or false-positive assumptions because it’s would compromise the role process.
Shadowing
Shadowing is the practice to follow the user in a usual day to understand the details for the process in the shoes of the user that the product/service is for. Example: You need to design an app that helps a shoe seller to finish the purchase. In this approach, you will follow the seller on a regular day of work to understand the workflow, gaps, pains and routine of a sell in the shoes of the professional.
Quantitative research
In this kind of research, we seek massive information about a subject. Quantitative research is good to develop and employ theories and hypotheses of the theme. This kind of research is more exploratory and useful when you need to understand some aspects of the public or answer general questions.
Interview with users
This “tool” is the most complicated because you need resources to do it. What kind of resources? well… time, money (because you can attract more people to participate when you give them a bonus or gift), opportunity (not every company see the value of this kind of tool), and especially, good questions. Here we need to make the right questions to not induce the answer and made the entire interview a mess. When we don’t do the right questions, unintentionally we can ask something that only confirms anything that we thought. That’s why the questions are the big deal for these tools.
Define
In this step, we take all information that we find in the previous step and use it to create the firsts outcomes. Some outcomes that we can make:
Personas
Persona is the personification of our public. We do this profile based on our previous research. On the internet, you can find many templates of personas, but there's no right answer about this, you need to find the characteristics that fit better in the project. The basic about a persona profile is:
- Name
- Age
- Occupation
- Address
- A quote that defines this persona
- A short description about the persona (tastes and routine) — Bio
- Goals and frustrations (about the subject of the project/research)
- Some other aspects that are relevant to the project.
Customer journey
Here we draw the journey of the user in the lifecycle of the product or service. We do a customer journey map that is a visual storyline of every engagement your user has with your service or product. This map includes all the actions your user takes to complete an objective across a period of time.
Develop
“How could we…?”
We arrive in the last quadrant of the diamond. Time to converge and make the solutions. “How could we…?” is the main question to create a solution about the outcomes earned on the previous steps. In a scenario like “The user don’t be confident with online payments” you need to ask the question “How could we give confidence for the user to do an online payment?” and the answers are the possible solutions for his problem.
Create solution
In the previous step, you create many solutions for some issues identified, so now you need to choose the one that has more fit with your subject, public, budget and time of implementation. With a solution chose, you can start the wireframing to validated the option selected.
Low fidelity wireframe and First Tests
The first steps to tests are the low fidelity wireframe. You can make it in a napkin or in a design tool, what’s matter is to share the idea of the solution with other people and validate it easily. Why low fidelity? because without colours, typography and this specification you can show your idea faster and the user can focus on the solution only.
These wireframes can be used to make initial tests, discard fail ideas, and understand small flows.
Deliver
Value map and Customer profile
The value map is a set of benefits from the value proposition that we create to attract new customers. To do this map you’ll need to think about 3 things:
- Products and services — You need to list all products and services around your value proposal.
- Gain creators — Describe how your product or service make gains to the user.
- Painkillers — Describe how your products and services relieve the pain of the users.
The customer profile talks about what is the user’s needs. We look for the pains, winnings and user’s tasks to draw this map.
- Winnings - What kind of goals or real benefits the users can reach.
- Pains - Describe bad experiences, risks, and barriers caused by user’s tasks.
- User’s tasks - Describe the real tasks the user’s do in the work or personal life with the own words.
Reminde: Any data in this map is a assumption, all the data used is from the research, persona, and all the other steps before.
High fidelity wireframes
High fidelity wireframes are the final outcome that you build to delivery. It’s time to put all the acquired knowledge into the final project! He you will design the final face of the product/service. In these steps, you can learn more about things like design system, meaning of colours, visual hierarchy etc.
Conclusion
The double diamond is a circle tool. You can wich new challenger that you get. After the delivery, the customers will be the testers and you could take the feedback (starting the cycle again) to improve more your product/service and make it more helpful for them. The most important is quickly learn from the failures!
Thank you so much for reading at the end.
P.S: It’s my first post in English!! I’m trying to improve my writing in English, so I hope soon my posts will be better.
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