Double Diamond is the name of a design process model developed by the British Design Council in 2005. Divided into four phases — Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver — it is probably the best known and the most popular design process visualization.
Source: British Design Council
The main feature of the Double Diamond is its emphasis on the “divergent” and “convergent thinking”, where first many ideas are created, before refining and narrowing down to the best idea. This is happening twice in this model — once to confirm the problem definition and once to create the solution.
This is about my journey from me being an Information Architect to UX Designer to Product Designer, and what I think about the current state of our industry.
Over 10 years ago I woke up one day and I decided to change my job title from Information Architect to User Experience Designer. I remember many Usability Specialists, Information Architects, Interface Designers, and Interaction Designers were telling me it is a fad back then. The term is imprecise, it’s bullshit-y, can experience even be designed?
And then, last year, I woke up one day and I decided to change my job title from User Experience Designer to Product Designer. And some UX Designers are telling me it’s a fad, and there is no real difference between User Experience Design and Product Design.
But to me they are different. And importantly: to me this new title is just more humble and true. And I think this is the thing that User Experience Designers need the most right now: to be more humble.
I’m not suggesting you should change your title as me. Frankly, you better not do it. I don’t care, really. But I’m here to tell you my reasons, and how I see the current state of our industry.
On the surface level it’s the most boring subject in the world: titles, just beating a dead horse, but as designers, we always love to discuss it, don’t we? But maybe it’s a little bit deeper.
On the false opposition between design and business, and why design doing and strategic thinking cannot be separated.
In the last few years consulting companies (such as Deloitte, PwC, McKinsey, Accenture and others) started to invest heavily in design and creative competences, mostly by buying independent digital agencies or design studios. It is still to be seen how this merging of cultures and teams will work and if consulting companies can compete with agencies and break even with this business. But why they are doing it? Isn’t business consulting more money by the hour than design or advertising?
After the iPhone X launch event there is a lot of discussion about its distinctive “notch” at the top of the screen, which is housing the cameras and sensors that enable Face ID. Many people, especially designers, are voicing their opinions that it is ugly and it’s something that is not up to Apple’s design standards. The icons and time display crammed into corners just look bad.
My take on one of the latest (and most important in my opinion) trends in digital design.
What is Anticipatory Design?
The term “anticipatory design” is getting traction recently to denote a form of design of products and services that make decisions on behalf of the user automatically without much need of user input. Anticipatory goes way beyond personalization to eliminate needless choice.
I admit that the title is a terrible clickbait, but I truly hope that UX has finally come to its end. At least the kind of UX we all knew. The times are gone when the UX designer used to be the lonely design evangelist preaching for the user’s satisfaction. UX designers are no longer the lone knights of arts and humanities in the techie world of IT.
Nowadays, it goes without saying that UX is crucial and we no longer need to explain how important it is. There are lots of buzzwords out there: user experience, customer experience or even human experience (can there be anything more vague? anything so vague that no one really knows what it actually is that you do?), client-centricity and, finally, design thinking. Everyone loves the buzzwords, even companies’ board members, who have nothing to do with design, but they do know that those words are important. Sadly enough, due to their vagueness, those words have often been downgraded to empty slogans (“The strategy of our organisation is aimed at increasing client-centricity through improving customer experience in the spirit of design thinking”) 😉 On top of that, many people believe that projects are born out of research, while they are actually born out of the ideas, work and experience of designers. Many can do great research, but they often fail at the design and delivery stages.
At Imagination Day conference in Warsaw I greatly enjoyed presentation by Anton Repponen and Irene Pereyra. Here’s an interview with this UX/design duo!
As User Experience Director / Designer, Irene Pereyra is responsible for translating business requirements into intuitive interactive solutions. A recipient of the prestigious Red Dot “Best of the Best” award, Anton Repponen is a highly influential designer in the digital creative industry. Together they run a design studio in NYC called Anton & Irene. Previously they both worked at Fantasy Interactive, one of the world's most respected digital agencies (Irene as a Global UX Director and Anton as a Global Creative Director). They were responsible for delivering creative solutions for clients such as Google, USA Today, Wacom and HTC, among others.
Another interview in the "Managing UX" series - this time in English. I'm talking with Darci Dutcher, Head of User Experience and Design at PhotoBox Group. Darci is a user experience designer and consultant with a background in cognitive psychology and technology. Her first job was designing airplane cockpits! Since then she has done UX work in industries including travel, finance, publishing, not-for-profit, compliance, and technology. She's passionate about Lean UX and Agile methodologies and will be speaking at ACE! Conference on Lean and Agile best practices in Kraków, Poland 16-17 June 2014.
IDEO is one of the largest and most important American design and consulting companies. Starting as an industrial design and interaction design studio (one of the founders was Bill Modgidge), IDEO has extended its consulting services to compete with business consulting companies like McKinsey.
What differs IDEO from the others is approach based on using the same tools while designing products - such as user’s observation, context of use analysis, prototyping and iterative process - for developing business and marketing strategy.
