Process

You all will recognize this as a typical design process. My activities during the design process depend on the size of my team, and my role on the project (project or people manager, product owner or creative director) and includes hands-on design if and where needed. While the actors, timelines and scope may be different for in-house vs consulting (agency) design, product development typically does go through these phases below. And in both environments, if phases or steps are skipped, such as building a deep understanding of the client, customer and the true opportunity, we’ll ‘pay’ for it later..

I love the ambiguity in the earlier phases of defining what we’ll be creating, and more importantly: why, turning deep understanding of the customer into scenario-driven designs, the tough calls to make to align scope, time and people to ensure quality and delight no matter how small or big the scope of the project will be… And I get a lot of satisfaction of getting all the ‘trains on the rails’ to ship a compelling product, system or service - preferably all three.

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  • Inquire

    • Business development

    • Alignment of objectives & expectations

    • Project planning, scoping & ‘resourcing’

    • Stakeholder interviews

    • Competitive research

    • Ethnographic research

  • Immerse

    • In-depth user and customer research

    • Technology research & exploration

    • (internal) Stakeholder interviews

    • Product/project strategy and recommendations based on research

    • High-level concepts to communicate the opportunities

    • People, project and client management

    • Ethical and environmental research/exploration

  • Design

    • Use cases and scenarios ( JTBD, 1 min- 1 hr - 1 week - 1 mo etc. )

    • Participatory design (with customers, with clients or within the multidisciplinary team)

    • Design process, roles & responsibilities, collaboration & critiques

    • Design - concepts, experience, interaction model, 
look and feel, integration with/hand off from or to existing experiences

    • Requirements & business rules/exit criteria

    • Concept testing with customers

    • Ongoing checkpoints with client and leadership

  • Implement & deploy

    • Planning, prioritization, scoping

    • Product and release strategy/roadmap

    • Detailed design
      (interaction, look & feel, motion etc)

    • Requirements, specs/exit criteria

    • UI copy & documentation

    • Sprint planning, sprint reviews and scrum meetings

    • Bug-bashes and quality control

    • People, project and client management and check-ins