UX design process: The Double Diamond
The essential skill for those who want to understand design, think like a designer and be able to effectively communicate it.
What is it for?
The main idea of Double Diamond is to help designers to structure their iterative design process. It consists of four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. Let’s break down each phase and learn how to walk through them.
If you prefer to watch a video instead, I also recorded one for you.
Phase 1: Discover
The first diamond represents the Discover phase. This is where the team seeks to understand the problem space, empathize with users, and gather valuable insights. Here’s how to approach this phase:
- Research: Conduct research to understand the users, their needs, behaviors, and pain points. This could involve user interviews, surveys, observation, and competitor analysis.
- Create personas: On the next step, it’s good to develop personas based on your research findings. Personas are characters that represent your target users. They are made up but help to humanize the users and keep their needs at the center of the design process.
3. User journey: Map out the user journey to understand how users interact with the product or service. This helps not only to identify pain points but also to find opportunities for improvement.
4. Define problems: Based on your research, define clear problem statements (i.e. the user can’t rent a car without going to the office, or the user doesn’t know how to make a doctor's appointment). These statements should articulate the user’s needs and pain points, setting the direction for the design process.
Phase 2: Define
The second diamond represents the Define phase. This is where you analyze the research findings, synthesize insights, and define a clear design direction. Here’s what to do:
- Synthesize data: Review all the research data, insights, and observations that you made in Phase 1. Look for patterns, repeating themes, and opportunities.
- Create user stories: Translate the insights into user stories. User stories describe the user’s goals and tasks in a simple, narrative format. They help keep the focus on user needs throughout the design process.
- Ideation workshops: Hold brainstorming sessions with your team to generate a wide range of ideas. Encourage divergent thinking, where quantity matters more than quality at this stage.
- Prioritize features: Determine which features or improvements will have the most impact on addressing the identified problems. This will guide the design and development efforts. A good way of prioritization is to give every team member a limited number of “points” to assign. Every person puts their points to the features they think are the most important and you count the points at the end. This is easily done with tools like FigJam or Miro or you can also use sticky-notes and a whiteboard.
Phase 3: Develop
The third diamond represents the Development phase. Here, you start to explore solutions, prototype, and test it with users. The common activities at this phase are:
- Concept development: Based on the ideation sessions, develop rough concepts and sketches. These can be low-fidelity and quick to create, focusing on exploring different directions.
- Prototyping: Create interactive prototypes to visualize how the solution will work. Prototypes can range from paper sketches to digital mockups using tools like Figma or Sketch. I recommend the latter as it’s faster and more efficient with participants.
- User testing: Conduct usability testing with real users. This helps validate your design assumptions, uncover usability issues, and gather feedback for iteration. Usually, I share a clickable prototype and ask the user to record their screens and voice via a Zoom call. That’s how you can observe not only the prototype usage but the user’s emotions and thoughts as well.
- Iterate: Based on user feedback, refine and iterate on the design. This might involve tweaking the user interface, adjusting features, or reconsidering the user flow. Repeat the flow until you have a decent prototype.
Phase 4: Deliver
The final diamond represents the Deliver phase. This is where you finalize the design, prepare assets, and hand it off to the development team. This is what it looks like:
- Design specifications: Make sure you have detailed design specs and guidelines for developers. This includes properly named UI elements, style guides, interactions, and animations. Thankfully, we have Dev Mode in Figma and tools like Zeplin that could help. Make sure your design is consistent across every screen/page.
- Collaborate with the dev team: Work closely with developers during the implementation. Clarify any design decisions, provide support, and conduct regular reviews.
- Launch and monitor: Once the product is launched, monitor its performance closely. Gather user feedback, track metrics, and iterate on the design based on real-world usage.
Conclusion
Of course, not everything of the above is used in the real design process. This is a perfect scenario. Sometimes we skip certain steps based on the budget or the project timeframe. However, the Double Diamond provides a clear and iterative approach to solving complex problems and creating user-centered designs. By following its four phases — Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver — you can create products and services that meet people’s needs.
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