Process.
The Double Diamond is a visualization of a creative process, or a design sprint, and allows any UX designer to understand and respond to the users’ needs. Developed by the British Design Council in 2005, and developed internally to unite and visualize creative processes from a wide variety of fields.
Discovery.
Define.
Develop.
Deliver.
The process helps teams work together towards a common goal and can be used effectively as a means of communication in meetings, such as when you need to inform your supervisor about the current status of the UX process, or when you want to show a UX stranger where and how user knowledge is being used in your organisation.
Discovery.
The first divergent quarter of the process model covers the start of the project. Designers try to look at the world in a fresh way, notice new things, challenge assumptions and gather insights.
Further understand the business and market by speaking with individuals who have a vested interest in the organization and the project.
- What is the problem or need we are aiming to solve?
- Who are the users or customers?
- Why is this important to them?
- What are their pain points?
- What is the business opportunity? (e.g.acquisition, activation, retention,revenue, referral, etc.)
People use digital products to achieve particular goals, not to look around and admire the design. This means products needs to fully support customer tasks.
- Usability
- Task Orientation
- Navigation
- Trust and Credibility
- Content Quality
- Visual Design
- Help and Feedback
Insight can be gained from a variety of places. Everything from feedback and complaints to User Interviews, working closely with our Product Owners and Stakeholders to bring it all together. Ensuring that your users goals, needs and preferences are balanced with the business’ is crucial to the success of the product.
- Start by bringing the insight together – excel documents to audio transcriptions to competitor benchmarking.
- Find the common themes in the information and continue to refine them as you go.
- Try to match up any qualitative information with analytics and quantitative data as this can help prioritise pain points and eventually the features which are developed first.
- Turn these common themes and insights into specific personas for your project, or look at refining the overall persona set, and use them as a basis for our BA team to help create User Stories.
Personas are created to better understand the goals, desires, and limitations of each key groups of users or stakeholders for a design.
- Is the persona based on contextual interviews with real customers?
- Does the persona appear realistic to people who deal with customers day-to-day?
- Is each persona unique, having little in common with other personas?
- Does the persona include product-relevant high-level goals and include a quotation stating the key goal?
- Can the development team use the persona as a practical tool to make decisions?
Involve stakeholders, team members and line manager. You should get feedback from stakeholders and your team members for finalizing the product features. This will help in refining your ideas and removing any feature creeps.
At this stage, you can also invite other business elements that can add value and take them through the findings.
Be open to ideas and iterate over various use cases.
Define.
The second convergant quarter represents the Ideation stage, in which designers try to make sense of all the possibilities identified in the Research phase. Which matters most? Which should we act on first? What is feasible? The goal here is to develop a clear creative brief that frames the fundamental design challenge.
A well defined user journey describes the persona’s interaction with the product. The focus is on describing how the persona will achieve the task by interacting with various interface elements of the product.
This phase is focused on devising solutions and delivering high-level specifications for product’s fundamental forms and behaviours.
- Start with the User Stories
- Draw a rough wireframe for each view and its component elements.
- Identify the major interaction elements for each view.
- Define relationships between the views and keep focus on the persona’s goal.
- Trim any unnecessary tasks and actions that deviate from the goal.
- Iterate the process to refine the flow and interaction elements.
A simple low fidelity, yet effective low-fidelity prototypes help us to validate important product concepts early in the design process. It helps us in getting early feedback, catch potential problems and get useful product insights.A visual skeletal framework of the product.
Wireframes should represent interface elements, navigation and functionalities of the product. Do not include any styling, color, or graphics. It’s recommended to use a wireframing tool so that various interface elements can be represented with higher accuracy.
- Prototyping is the quickest way to get feedback on app flow and features.
- Get feedback on app flow and high-level concepts rather than on individual elements.
- Details will be tackled in high-fidelity prototypes.
Test flow, interactions and overall UX to assess how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability testing employs techniques to collect empirical data while observing representative end users using the product to perform realistic tasks.
It has been observed that the best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
- At this stage, it’s advisable to conduct a validity test. Conducted late in the development cycle, it is intended to measure usability of a product against established benchmarks
- Prior to the test, benchmarks or standards for the tasks of the test are either developed or identified.
- Participants are given tasks to perform with either very little or no inter-action with a test moderator.
- The collection of quantitative data is the central focus
Involve stakeholders, team members and line manager. You should get feedback from stakeholders and your team members for finalizing the product features. This will help in refining your ideas and removing any feature creeps.
At this stage, you can also invite other business elements that can add value and take them through the findings.
Be open to ideas and iterate over various use cases.
Develop.
The third divergent quarter marks a period of development where solutions or concepts are created, prototyped, tested and iterated. This process of trial and error helps designers to improve and refine their ideas.
Visual Design greatly affects UX concerning the interplay of colors, icons and fonts, good visual design inspires positive emotions, creates pleasure, and increases user retention.
Moreover, according to Aesthetic-usability effect, a visually appealing design is perceived to be easier to use.
- Make sure that the controls are reachable and noticeable.
- Layout should create a good vertical rhythm that supports the communication of the content hierarchy.
- Use color theory to get better interaction of colors. Also, colors can be used intelligently to highlight messages, notifications and errors after a user has interacted with an element.
- Choose your icons carefully as they affect the clarity of your design. Avoid using too many icons.
- Use a legible font with right spacing and kerning. Font color and size should make the content readable.
Digital accessibility is crucial for creating a truly inclusive world for everyone. For people with disabilities, it means equal access to online education, healthcare, employment and ecommerce. In the age of social media, it even means equal access to friendship and social growth.
- Pages have straightforward document structure, readable without a CSS file
- All links and navigation drop-down functionality can be used without a mouse
- ARIA landmarks and other assistive technology indicators are integrated as appropriate
- Proper hierarchy of non-content heading levels
- Alternative text on all non-content images
- Proper table-cell markup on all non-content data tables
- Contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for small text and 3:1 for larger text
- Descriptive link text
At this stage, you should be ready with a high-fidelity prototype.
It is quite close to the final product, with lots of details and functionality. There will be a set of usability problems for which any particular low fidelity prototype will be inadequate.
A high-fidelity prototype should be used to examine usability questions in detail and make strong conclusions about how behavior will relate to use of the final product.
- More faithful to the eventual product.
- Ability to build in rich interactions, smart behaviors, data-driven logic and mobile gestures.
- Effective design communication tool between internal members of the design team, and between design team and external partners.
- Ability to share and test prototypes on different devices, or Cloud them across to stakeholders for comment, helps to cut rework and scope creep.
- Test user reactions to the interface to get an honest picture of how successful your design solution is.
Small details that exist around features, Microinteractions are the contained product moments that do one small task.
They exist around and inside of features, in every app, website, and appliance.
- Microinteractions have four parts: a Trigger, the Rules, Feedback, and Loops/Modes.
- Trigger can be a manual control, such as when a user clicks a button or an icon, or it can be the system trigger that goes off when a set of conditions has been met.
- Feedback lets people know what’s happening.
- Loops determine how long the microinteraction goes on for, if it repeats, and how it changes over time.
Test flow, interactions and overall UX to assess how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability testing employs techniques to collect empirical data while observing representative end users using the product to perform realistic tasks.
It has been observed that the best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
- At this stage, it’s advisable to conduct a validity test. Conducted late in the development cycle, it is intended to measure usability of a product against established benchmarks
- Prior to the test, benchmarks or standards for the tasks of the test are either developed or identified.
- Participants are given tasks to perform with either very little or no inter-action with a test moderator.
- The collection of quantitative data is the central focus
Involve stakeholders, team members and line manager. You should get feedback from stakeholders and your team members for finalizing the product features. This will help in refining your ideas and removing any feature creeps.
At this stage, you can also invite other business elements that can add value and take them through the findings.
Be open to ideas and iterate over various use cases.
Deliver.
The final convergent quarter of the double diamond model is the Validation stage, where the resulting project (a product, service, or environment, for example) is tested, finalised, produced, and launched.
You must be able to provide a full suite of prototypes and annotations when handing over to dev. Remember, these will serve as reference not only to dev, but also testing. The UX prototype can also be included as part of the bundle. Discuss with dev and BA the best way to spread the work into tickets. Take the developer again through the prototypes and designs, if necessary.
Reach out to the developers to create a clear dialogue. A dev ready design is a pixel perfect design. At this point you should also cover all scenarios, states and breakpoints/devices. Annotations should be prepared for all existing and new UI components.
Always helpful to take the UI developers through the designs at this stage and sense check all that needs to be provided from a build perspective.
- All scenarios requested are ready.
- Hover/pressed, expanded/collapsed,etc. states
- Mobile, tablet and desktop and any additional breakpoints
- Annotations of UI components and states if needed
People use digital products to achieve particular goals, not to look around and admire the design. This means products needs to fully support customer tasks.
- Usability
- Task Orientation
- Navigation
- Trust and Credibility
- Content Quality
- Visual Design
- Help and Feedback
Involve stakeholders, team members and line manager. You should get feedback from stakeholders and your team members for finalizing the product features. This will help in refining your ideas and removing any feature creeps.
At this stage, you can also invite other business elements that can add value and take them through the findings.
Be open to ideas and iterate over various use cases.