Leon govier Design
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Personas are created to better understand the goals, desires, and limitations of each key groups of users or stakeholders for a design.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Life’s a bit odd at the moment and we are all learning to do new things, so let’s arrange a virtual chat over tea, coffee or beer!