- Product and service design today
are part of modern business processes
frequently modeled after agile and lean methodologies.
Lean and agile are manufacturing processes
that are designed to create products faster
by reducing waste.
They define waste as anything that is ultimately
not used in the development of the working product.
With the popularity of these processes,
most have adapted their work to occur
within short cycles or sprints.
Many design teams have adapted by continuing
to use a Waterfall approach, or a very linear
design process, but working a cycle ahead.
That way, they're able to still hand off designs
in a coordinated effort by staying ahead of development.
Unfortunately, this separates and lengthens
the design thinking process of framing the problem,
learning from that, and then making something
to see if it's even effective.
You may be wondering what's so inefficient about that.
Well first of all, now the design team is working
within different cycles, separating them
from other team members, potentially creating
technology debt and design waste.
Secondly, rather than fostering collaboration,
this frequently makes it necessary
for a subset of the design team to spend
even longer cycles yet to create design
deliverables for feedback.
So how do you create more synergy between the whole team?
Plan your design cycle focusing on who your team is,
and what you hope to create and learn.
This will enable everyone to work together
on a shared goal and experience.
You'll find this shortens the time it takes
to identify roadblocks and discover new opportunities.
To accomplish this, we must plan
these design cycles carefully.
Practice planning your activities with this worksheet.
If you'd like to follow along, you'll find the worksheet
in the Exercise File.
First, you'll need to figure out who will be on your team.
Will it be one or many, and what skills
and outlooks will they be able to contribute?
Using the worksheet, place their names
along the range from who can provide business goals
through user needs and experience.
I'll share a secret with you.
They may not have the word designer or creative
in their title.
Use this to your advantage to attack
the design challenges from different angles together.
Oh, and if you're not a team of one, fear not.
You can lean on other people that can
provide business goals, user needs, testing and validations
on a very limited basis.
Next, move on to the second section,
and choose an experience or concept to simulate
with a prototype.
Ask yourself what part of the experience
will be concepted and made,
and what tool or tools will be used to prototype it?
Think of it this way.
These prototypes will replace a written design document,
and any doc that does not allow
someone to interact with the design
should be removed to reduce waste, if possible.
Lastly, move to that third section
and define exactly what you hope to learn,
and how you'll learn from the outcome.
We use prototyping to validate, gauge interest,
and test designs rapidly.
This reduces design debt drastically
while greatly increasing collaboration.
So practice planning your activities
using the three step worksheet.
I'll know you'll save a ton of time
using prototyping within these compressed cycles,
and realize your ideas faster.