Day 33 — Process series 2/7: “Double Diamond”
Created more than a decade ago, Double Diamond is arguably one of the most adopted creative-focus processes across design teams, product teams, and development teams. The simple diagram which illustrates both the 4-step process (x axis) and the diverge-converge on ideas and direction (y-axis), clearly paint a design process that product and development team can quickly grasp.
While it’s been broadly adopted across the globe, there’s also thoughts about its limitations and area for improvement. In this Design Process series I’m writing this week, I’d like share my observations and experience of taking, using, learning from Double Diamond.
Facts & Opinions
In the world full of fake news, let’s start with the segregation process between facts & opinions of Double Diamond:
Facts:
According to Wikipedia (and other source to prove its factual quality), Double Diamond is the name of a design process model developed by the British Design Council in 2005. It suggests that the design process should have four phases:
- Discover
- Define
- Develop
- Deliver
According to the creator of Double Diamond, “in order to discover which ideas are best, the creative process is iterative. This means that ideas are developed, tested and refined a number of times, with weak ideas dropped in the process. This cycle is an essential part of good design.”
Opinions
- Pro: It helps decide the right methods and activities for pursuing a problem or opportunity. The model scales well to accommodates many situations.
- Pro: The simplicity of the Double Diamond makes it a fantastic tool for communication. Communicating progress of your project to an external audience is significantly easier when sharing the Double Diamond.
- Against: Why narrow down so many ideas to just one based on the consensus of however many designers. What about the user?
- Against: It’s completely separating the analysis/discovery and the definition of the problem from the ideation and the delivery of the solution(s).
Love & Hate
Sometimes when people heavily invest in tools, props, daily things, they develop emotion toward objects and processes. We all know friends or family name their cars, houses, musical instruments, golf clubs, or even cellphone. It’s not so surprising that there are emotional comments about a popular process like Double Diamond. Just to name a few:
Positive Feeling
Negative Feeling
- ‘“Design Brief” or “Problem Definition”, but to me any written “documents of vision” or specifications are not really good starts for a design. They are boring, lifeless, uninspiring and often dead on arrival.’
- “It’s pretty demotivating for service designers to work in this way, where their designs get thrown over a wall without any certainty that they will ever get implemented in a way that aligns to the original vision.”
Pros & Cons
After hearing so much about opinions and emotions, perhaps it’s time for some analysis about its pros and cons to do the justice. Here’s my observation in which I’m trying my best to be objective:
Pros
- Clarity: In my experience, the diagram of Double Diamond is by far the most powerful and efficient way to communicate the model of the design process, also very easy to remember. Comparing to the Double Diamond shape, the 5 boxes of Design Thinking or Google Design Sprint don’t have such a effect, and designers ended up have to educate stakeholders again and again.
- Flexibility: The discovery stage in the model can be any type of analysis. Ideally we will utilize user-centered approach in this phase, but the activities is not limited to UX professional’s skill set. For example, a product owner can go to a campus and talk to college students as users, or a marketing team can run a market survey or conduct a focus group meeting.
Cons
- Implication of Ending without Iterations: Unlike other process models like Design Thinking that specifically point out the testing part in the diagram, Double Diamond shows less clues around a iterative process and the end of the second diamond signifies “the resulting project is finalized, produced and launched”.
- Lack of Mandatory User Involvement: Although in British Design Council official site did mention UCD approach like like user diaries, journey mapping, the issue is in the Double Diamond process explanation, the diagram itself didn’t illustrate much about user involvement. Because the nature of its flexibility, we’ve witnesses product teams adopting Double Diamonds in an Waterfall fashion and not including users until (it’s too late) end of the process.
All in all, Double Diamond works fine in many type of projects for its nature of flexible to adopt. Some people use it in a Waterfall fashion, some others merely adopt it in an Agile environment for it’s diverge-converge concept. It’s really project team’s decisions to whether emphasize the importance of “testing with users and iterate” during the process.
In my experience, when dealing with new stakeholders that have low UX maturity, I tend to adopt Double Diamond to secure quick wins and build trust. Once we established credibility, it’s easier to talk to stakeholders about Design Thinking or other processes that tend to take larger investment and longer time to finish.
Now & Future
Now
Standing alongside other popular design processes like Design Thinking or Lean UX, and the new kids on the block, Google Design Sprint, Double Diamond may not be the most discussed process model in the industry these days. However, the simplicity of the concept, and the flexibility to interpretation and implementation, help it keeping a seat at the table, especially in the environment/ industries that are less Agile and more Watefall.
Future
As we are seeing the almost unstoppable trends of “software is everywhere”, we can expect that more and more industries and organizations will adopt Agile principles. The popularity of Design Thinking is also growing and we see those derivatives like Lean UX and Google Design Sprint. Is Double Diamond going to evolve to a Diamond Necklace like Christina Wodtke propose? Or there’s other possibility to keep its future relevancy? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
