A friend of mine hit me up for advice on design process and working with his designer. This is what came out. I thought it might be worth sharing.

* * *

Hey,

I can’t say I have a design process I subscribe to strictly, but I will say that I do have a few principles I try to follow. They are:

0. Have clear, agreed upon goals
1. Diverge wildly. 
2. Converge deliberately.
3. Iterate/Refine against the audience.

I should elaborate.

0. Have clear, agreed upon goals

Know very clearly what a design/feature is supposed to do for your user. I strongly recommend Clay Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-done framework for thinking clearly about what features in your product is supposed to do for your customers. The key question is, “What is your customer hiring your product for?” The answer here ought to be informed by get-out-of-your-building research.

See: Milkshake Marketing and Six Steps to Put Christensen’s Jobs-to-be-Done Theory into Practice

“Agreed upon” is also key, but I will come back to this one later.

1. Diverge wildly

At the start of every design process, generate numerous ideas. Go nuts. Explore many, substantively different directions. Don’t spend too much time on each one. The key is to maximize your initial coverage of the solution space. 

This is a lot of work, but it’s worth it. It is essential to push past the first few obvious ideas, even if it is only to confirm that the first few are the right way to go. Put another way, this is to circumvent the local maxima problem - you don’t want to prematurely settle on suboptimal solution.

2. Converge deliberately

This is where having clear goals become useful. You can evaluate your explorations against the goals/criteria you’ve agreed upon. The agreed upon goals now gives you a common language for evaluating the design, and discussions become more objective than subjective. Use your goals and criteria to converge on a few directions to further pursue.

Caveat on Intuition: don’t discount subjectivity or intuition. Another name for intuition is practiced pattern-matching, and it is exactly why your designer is valuable.

If you have more time, a very short book from my professor about language and leadership: http://pangaro.com/littlegreybook.pdf

3. Iterate/Refine against your audience

You know who your audience is right? Find a way to put your design in front of them, and watch how they respond to it. Ideally in person, but online is ok too. Pit your observations against your stated goals and hypothesis. Does your product/feature in fact get your customer’s job-to-be-done … done?

Caveat on Metrics: Designers are suspicious of A/B tests, and for good reason. A/B tests only tells you that a user did or did not reach their goal. It doesn’t tell you why. It’d be a whole separate blogpost to discuss what kind of questions A/B tests can or cannot answer. For now, just know that A/B testing driven design is like a random-walk hill-climbing algorithm. It’s slow, inefficient, and doesn’t guarantee climbing a high hill.

Tools I might use: Silverback to record usability sessions, Ethnio to recruit subjects, Optimize.ly for A/B testing

Hope that helps a bit? For an opinion with more credibility than mine, I’d watch this Ryan Singer (designer at 37signal) video from a conference talk: http://vimeo.com/15772341 Ryan Singer is awesome.

Tony