Design has become more central to business success, recognised as a wider, deeper discipline that can discover and deliver on the real needs of customers, creating better products and services. As design matures, methods and approaches have rapidly shifted, changed, extended, been renamed (and invented terminology), evolved, questioned established practices, responded to new technologies, been a part of shifting company cultures.
I’ve been gathering, learning, trying, using, explaining (ideally in plain english) and documenting all of the above for many years as my own aide memoire.
There is no easy way to categorise or organise these methods without becoming prescriptive in terms of process, so I have adopted for a pick and mix approach - select what you need dependent on project, context, preferences - a loosely organised ‘spice box’ of methods and skills.
Though many of these methods are focused on users - finding ways to keep a genuine focus on users always seems to be a struggle for many businesses. Making a clear commitment up front to how and how often you’ll be in direct contact with your customers and sticking with it, has in the end always been for me the most important part of any success in designing products and services.
Get ready, stay steady
Lifecycle processes
Double diamond
Lean UX
The IBM loop
GDS
GV design sprints
Adaptive
Design thinking
Analogy
Product management & UX
UX in Agile process
Diagraming process
Leadership, planning & governance
Shaping, mobilising & managing projects
Creating and motivating teams
UCD, CX, UX, UXD, SD..
Design tools
Project kick off
Project team kick off
Pre-mortem
Culture mapping
Requirement gathering and documentation
Project Canvas
Discovery & definition
Problem definition / Opportunity space
Generative research
Desk research
Secondary research
Competitor benchmarking
Social market trends / PESTLE / SWOT
Analytics
Content audit
Brand research
Expert review
Business research
Understand technology parameters (CMS, 3rd Party Services)
Stakeholder mapping, interviews
& workshops
User research, Qual & Quant
User Recruitment
Depth interviews
Contextual research
Content strategy
Jobs to be done
Storytelling
Co-design
Ethnographic research
Longitudinal research
Diary studies
Mapping user need
Personas
Experience mapping
Task modelling
Service ecosystem map
Service blueprint
Prioritisation
Business model canvas
Service proposition
Road mapping
Measurement frameworks
Brand definition and strategy
Brand design principles
Define design principles
Designing / building / testing
Designing for screens, voice, AR/VR +
Designing for context
Design systems
Design for learning
Storyboard
Moodboard
Brand workshops
Concepts, ideation
Co-creation workshopping
Content design
Short form creative brief
Information architecture
Card sorting
Sitemaps
Navigation models
Sketching & Wireframes
Prototyping
Paper and pen
Software tools
Coded
Performance metrics
Design within Agile
Design/Dev workflows
Documenting design decisions
Data visualisation & Dashboards
Usability testing
Guerrilla testing
Lab based testing
Remote moderated testing