Having a structured design process is how I build delightful experiences that customers need while creating enduring business value. I’ve developed this design framework over 5 years of applying design thinking in my different roles. I’ve taken inspiration from the double diamond, IDEO, the 5 stages of design thinking, design thinkers, and my personal experience.

Introduction

There is no right or wrong design process! The great thing about building a design process is that it gives you a framework and tools that you can then easily apply depending on what you need to use as the process develops.

Foundation

The very first thing I like to do is establish our baseline understanding of the upcoming project or task. It can be helpful to ask a lot of questions. Who am I reporting to? Am I leading the initiative? Do we have a timeline? Who are the stakeholders? Do we have expectations for how this work will tie into the larger team and organization goals? Asking these questions will allow me to set expectations, timelines, and initial goals so we can jump into discovery with an idea of what sorts of exploration we’ll need to pursue.

My product example: When consolidating Hello Divorce’s two account spaces into one seamless customer experience, I had to fully define and outline what exactly we were migrating and how we expected this would benefit both the business and our customers. This would enable the setting of expectations and driving alignment for our stakeholders, developers, and customer teams.

Research

Once we understand what we’re doing from a business perspective, it’s time to really dive into the customer’s perspective and the competitive perspective. I use the Foundations discovered earlier to establish what sort of research I’ll need to do, or I’ll connect with our research team and make sure we’re in alignment with research methods, areas, and groups. This is the time when we can be the most open to new ideas! A lot of times research will uncover so much more than what we thought we were looking for in the foundational expectations we set.

My product example: When I was leading the development of the Child Support Calculator, I collaborated extensively with lawyers, accountants, and parents to understand the constraints, pain points, and pitfalls of the current calculator experience as well as understand the 120+ required fields we would need to support with our calculator solution.

Synthesis

Since research can uncover so much we want to ensure we then define the themes and insights of this process of synthesizing our research. From this research we uncover our personas, user journeys, empathy maps, storyboards and other artifacts. We then use these artifacts to discover what opportunities are most actionable and impactful going forward.

My product example: In my work at Hello Divorce, it’s been absolutely imperative to understand our customers and their journey. For our non-client account space we specifically wanted to target the customers who were 2-4 years out from buying our divorce. Using that research allowed me to tailor the dashboard experience and decrease the bounce rate by 30%.

Ideation

Next we take those most actionable and impactful ideas and we get to explore again! This is our opportunity to work together to quickly explore how we’re going to implement the opportunities we defined from the synthesis step. This is where we can push ourselves - we should go beyond the obvious! This is our opportunity to surprise ourselves - we’ve defined what opportunities we’re focusing on, but is there a way to surprise and delight? Is there a way to simplify and streamline? This is the time to create with (almost!) no constraints!

My product example: When developing the Hello Divorce app experience, I worked through many sketches to determine the best way to easily and quickly walk through the divorce experience while still understanding the engineering constraints. This back and forth with sketches and ideas helped us settle on the current implementation.

Quick note! We need to communicate with developers, engineers, stakeholders, and more throughout this process. In work environments, surprises (even good ones!) are not appreciated. I specifically like to have a developer update at this point in time. Depending on the size of the project, this can be a Slack heads up or a more formal meeting.

Prioritize

Now it’s time to circle back to the foundation we established. We want to ensure that we are able to evaluate our exploration against the business and customer goals. Even though we have a great foundation we’re working off of, we need to use this time to verify the research we did and the assumptions we made as we were exploring the ideas. Something like an impact/effort matrix can help us as we evaluate different solutions.

My product example: When I led the initial product direction for Sylvan Library I knew we had to be most impactful as quickly as possible to start getting customers to use our service. Although we anticipate that implementing the card-trading functionality will be most lucrative long-term, we’ll be able to get more users and initial customer buy-in if we start with focusing on pre-constructed deck management.

Prototype + Iterate

Prototyping allows us to quickly implement tests that mock-up what and how our users will be doing and drive stakeholder buy-in before we invest in expensive engineering infrastructure. Allowing users to test low, mid, and high-fidelity prototypes can ensure that we can quickly receive feedback and then iterate and improve the product before we bring deep engineering lifts into our work.

My product example: When I led the integration of the home equity calculator, prototypes were not only imperative for potential customers to give me feedback, but also for me to drive alignment from our leadership team. Allowing our CEO, B2B partner, and Growth Director to click through my ideas ensured they were on board with our new client experience.

Handoff

After we explored prototypes and have developed the most promising ones then it’s time to make sure our designs are pixel-perfect and documented so we can hand off to the developers and engineers. Ideally we’ve previously worked with engineers to ensure we have shared language, expectations, a design system, and rituals that help ensure a successful handoff.

My product example: I’ve been able to work closely with the Senior Staff Engineer at Sylvan Library to ensure we have agreed upon definitions for our handoff phase as well as shared language regarding our component library in Storybook, and asynchronous updates with Jira.

Ongoing Support

Now that we’re released there’s always room to improve! This is a great opportunity for us to touch base with our customer team or if there’s time to actually work with the customers and ensure that they’re continuing to happily use our product! It’s so important to continue to iterate and improve. My core values are to be continuously learning, and progress not perfection!

My product example: My weekly meetings with the Hello Divorce customer team ensured that I was able to get feedback on some changes that did not perform as expected. My established channels of communication enabled us to acknowledge and roll back the changes within a single business day.

Final Thoughts

I’m always excited to improve and acquire new tools and processes for my toolbox. Depending on the scenario we may implement all or just some of these steps. What’s your design process look like? Is it similar?

My Design Process