Re-thinking design thinking part VII: The new design process in brief
The current design thinking process is rigid, slow and focuses on wrong things. In the previous parts of this series of blog posts I have described why the current process is flawed and how it can be fixed.
The initial blog post series assumed that the reader is quite familiar with the prevailing design thinking process. After explaining the new process to less experienced designers, I’ve noticed that it is easiest to tell the story through the templates that we use: the Design Arena Canvas and the Design Kanban Board. This post will therefore tell the story in the simplest way that I can think of (for now). It’s cutting some corners but mostly the gist of it is there.
Why the new process?
The new design process model and the new tools save time and money, unleash creativity, increase communication in the organisation, and provide one flexible working model for the design.
Speed and agility: the current design thinking process model is rigid and slows us down. The new process encourages efficient parallel work for all team members, and reduces risk of dramatic re-iterations.
Creative approach: the design team can be creative from day one. There’s no need to wait for extensive analysis phases to end. This supports exploring designs on the fringes or beyond the brief, where usually the most interesting radical innovation happens.
Compatible with agile: software development moved to agile a decade ago. When design is done in agile manner instead of the phased waterfall, it is compatible with the contemporary software development processes.
Communicative: the shared canvases support communication inside the design and development team and with the stakeholders, thereby increasing team cohesion and speed.
One working model: The new process model combines best parts of design thinking, human-centered design, engineering design, applied arts, and the agile software movement. It works equally for early exploration and innovation, mid-term concept design, and fast agile development projects. There’s no need for the organization to learn different project models for different projects.
Easy to start: For people who have a design mindset, taking the new process in use is relatively easy. With the following steps you can start the transition right away.
Setting up a design project
The Design Arenas Canvas is a tool that you use throughout the design process. Set it up at the beginning of a project. Preferably, reserve lots of wall for the Design Arenas Canvas. It will eventually take a full wall of your project room.
The canvas is a shared tool and common point of reference that ensures team coherence across different disciplines in the team. It will evolve throughout the design process, and you maintain the same canvas with the subsequent releases of your products and services.
Start the project with a session with the entire project team, in which you post on the canvas your brief, starting points, questions and assumptions:
Purposes: what do you expect the purpose of your artefacts are for the beneficiaries? Do you assume some primary functions or features?
Beneficiaries: who the end result is for? Who will benefit (and who might suffer) from the solution? A beneficiary is not necessarily a person; it could be a community in large, or a company providing a service or part of the value chain. If you have earlier useful segmentation or personas, use them here. In which contexts will the beneficiaries meet your artefacts?
Artefacts: earlier versions, existing reference products, available technologies, etc. Possibly you already have ideas for new solutions. List them here, too.
Evaluations: is there existing studies of similar solutions? Can you already define some targets or KPIs/KEIs for your solution?
If you have difficulties in finding content for each design arena, start with brainstorming possible artefacts — products, services, solutions — and then analyse these ideas: what they are good for (purposes), who they would fit best (beneficiaries), and success criteria for the ideas (evaluations). Be ready at any time later to change your mind, if your assumptions don’t seem to be correct after all. Keep an eye on the coherence of the canvas so that the design arenas are in sync: the artefacts fulfil the purposes for your beneficiaries verified by evaluations.
As you see, even the first version of the canvas will already have some ingredients of the solution. For the rest of the project you just refine each of the design arenas until you reach your solution. This is one of the key insights of the new process: the solution is in fact just a more mature version of the problem setting.
Running the design project
Organize your work in sprints of 2–3 weeks. In each sprint, work on the assumptions and questions in the design canvas that you are least confident of. In this way you can keep the design arenas in balance, so that none of the arenas is left behind because that will start accumulating risks in your process. Imagine if you are uncertain about the needs your beneficiaries, and only too late find out that they have no need for your product: you need to rewind many weeks or months. Stay balanced to avoid risks.
For each sprint, organize a sprint demo, a sprint planning session, and a sprint retrospective. Remember to involve everyone in the team.
Sprint demo: After each sprint, show the sprint results, including possible releases, latest artefact designs, research, evaluation results, and refinements to the purpose. The Design Arenas Canvas should always be up-to-date, but at least make sure you update it for the demo. The demo ensures that everyone is on the same page. It is also a good place to invite a wider stakeholder group to see the progress.
Sprint planning: For the upcoming sprint, define compact tasks that will help to resolve the most uncertain topics on any design arena. Aim to keep the arenas in balance; don’t leave any behind. Update the Design Kanban Board, which is the to-do list for the whole team. Keep the amount of tasks in the in-progress status to a minimum. Don’t leave lots of open issues to linger over sprints.
Sprint retrospective: have a group session of what went well, what should be improved, and create an action plan to fix possible problems. This will help you optimise the team working practices, which is essential for a high performance team.
Finishing the design project
At the end, when you are ready (or run out of time or resources), the Design Arenas Canvas will be your primary end result. Because of physical constraints of the canvas, you will certainly have additional materials beyond the canvas, including all digital goods. However, the canvas will be the most important top level summary of all the design arenas, and therefore the most valuable shared resource that you will have.
A typical design project has so far concentrated producing the concrete physical or digital artefacts as results. With the Design Arenas Canvas, the other arenas are equally important. You will have a clear statement of the vision and purpose. You have accumulated lots of knowledge about the lives and motivations of your beneficiaries. For example, these will help you in defining how you should communicate about the product. In addition, you have initial evaluations and performance targets for your product that you can now start measuring to much more in detail when the artefacts are in the hands of the beneficiaries.
A project will never end at the product launch. Now it’s the time to start following the analytics to see how the digital artefacts are taken into use. Soon you will also be able to gather qualitative and quantitative data in the post-launch studies.
After the design project
Design is not over when the first release of the product or service is launched. In fact, usually this is a start of a long journey.
First, you can learn tremendously by analysing how the artefacts are taken into use by the beneficiaries. For any complex designs there will be both expected and unexpected consequences, and appropriation beyond you imagination.
Don’t scrap the Design Arenas Canvas. It will be your primary reference when you track the success of the artefacts that you have introduced to the world. Most likely you will need revisions based on the data you collect. Any sustainable business must evolve their products and services further, and the Design Arenas Canvas will be elemental for the success of the consecutive releases.
Note, that the artefact is only one of the four design arenas. Artefacts are only the physical manifestation of all the learnings so far. In fact, the most essential information for the future you can find in the three other arenas: evaluations, beneficiaries, and the purpose that your products and services are there to fulfil.
If you are interested in why and how these tools and processes fix the flaws of the currently dominant design thinking process, I recommend reading through the full series of blog posts.
Finally, the most important recommendation what comes to design processes, methods and tools: don’t copy-paste them — be mindful how you design and decide yourself.
Panu Korhonen is a designer at Nordkapp who sometimes wonders why things are done the way they are done.
In his projects he wants to create designs that save the world.
