Design is a broad term and we are going to focus on user centred design for digital services and products here.
When we start to think about design we look towards user research to understand what problems we are trying to solve. By creating cross-functional teams we bring together User Research, User Experience, Content Writers and Developers to solve these problems.
This problem solving starts in Discovery and provides a rich picture of the type of users, their aims and any frustration they are encountering. We do this by conducting stakeholder analysis, mapping user journeys and understanding user and business perspectives. During this phase we investigate options, identify quick wins and try and show what bigger solutions looks like that could be explored in an Aplha phase.
We use evidence based design patterns to build proof of concepts which we test with users in our design, build and test cycles. The aim here is to assess if we have understood the problem and are providing clear solutions which help users achieve what they set out to do.
As the project evolves we begin to scale up the solution from a proof of concept to a working prototype that looks and feels like what users expect it to. Here we can begin to integrate front and back end tech, the whole user journey and cross channel communications if required.
The whole time we are conducting user research and testing what we are doing, gaining feedback and improving the solution as we take to into live service.