All about the Double Diamond UX design process

If you’re a UX designer looking to decrease churn and significantly improve the user experience, you may just need more diamonds in your life. Two diamonds, to be precise: Enter the Double Diamond design process.

Like any other creatives, UX designers often struggle with defining the real ask from stakeholders while delivering an end product that meets those not-well-defined requirements. And because the design process is iterative and involves many approvals from many different people, it’s common to spend endless revisions satisfying everyone in a meeting instead of genuinely improving the end-user experience.

Adding to the complexity is that there are general steps to UX designing, but nothing extremely rigid. That’s great for allowing flexibility within an organization, but it can lead to production paralysis—people can have different ideas of where to start and what the design process should include.

If that doesn’t sound like you, though, it’s possible that your team is actually following the Double Diamond design process already without even knowing it. Once you’ve learned more about this process, you can consciously follow it and refine your development process even further.

What is the Double Diamond UX design process? 

The Double Diamond process allows for divergent and convergent thinking in the design process. It provides a structured framework for designers to follow while allowing flexibility for creativity and exploration, so it can be customized for any situation. 

We'll go into four stages in the Double Diamond process in more detail, but it’s important to remember that the stages aren’t linear. You can revisit stages as often as you’d like to ensure you haven’t missed anything important, but it’s important not to rearrange them.

How to complete the Double Diamond UX design process

As we mentioned, there are four fundamental components to the Double Diamond UX design process. We’ll go through what they are and how to complete them.

The first diamond

Discovery 

This phase is about understanding the problem that needs to be solved and gaining alignment on it. This involves conducting research, user interviews, data analysis, and anything else to help designers understand user needs, behaviors, and pain points. The goal is to uncover improvement opportunities and define the design challenge. In this phase, you’ll need to prioritize conducting research and identifying user needs.

Definition 

Once you have a clear idea of the problem that needs to be solved, you can narrow down the details. You’ll synthesize all your work from the “discovery” phase. The goal is to clearly articulate the problem statement and set the direction for the design solution. In this phase, you must prioritize developing personas, creating user journey maps, and establishing design requirements.

The second diamond

Development

You’re off to the races. This is where you’re able to bring your ideas to life. You’ll even be able to start testing your product with end users. Then, based on the testing data, you may want to revisit that first diamond and rework your definition. Or you may find your design is great, but needs a few improvements. This stage typically includes developing prototypes, sketches, or even working models. In this phase, you’ll need to prioritize conducting usability tests and iterating.

Delivery

It’s showtime. After much testing and many (so many) prototypes, it’s time to hand over your masterpiece. But don’t be fooled—you’re not done forever. After all, after the first iPhone came even better iPhones. Once you deliver your finished product, you’ll be able to get even better feedback from an even wider audience. In this phase, you’ll prioritize collaborating with development teams, QA testing, and preparing for launch by getting marketing involved and consulting PR and sales teams.

Advantages of the Double Diamond UX design process

So why bother with the Double Diamond design process in the first place? It offers several advantages that could help you and your team.

First, it provides a structure for creativity. Have you ever tried conducting a brainstorm without rules? It doesn’t go well. Creativity needs structure to thrive, and this design process allows it room and borders to flourish. It also provides a starting point that reveals more profound solutions, it’s flexible enough to allow for divergent thinking, and it empowers designers to take ownership of the process.

What the Double Diamond design process is not

This is a great structured framework for approaching design challenges, but it’s not perfect for every project. Here’s what the Double Diamond design process isn’t:

• A substitute for creativity: You’ll need to still create and iterate. There shouldn’t be limits to creative thinking during this process.

• Exclusively for designers: We’ve talked primarily about UX in this post, but Double Diamond design can be used for anyone from marketing to business strategizers. 

• A standalone methodology: You can use the Double Diamond approach alone. However, it works well alongside other methods, such as Agile, to collaborate and deliver.

Why use the Double Diamond UX design process? 

The Double Diamond UX Design Process allows convergent and divergent thinking to flourish and eventually coalesce into a user-centric product that capitalizes on the most promising solutions. This design process is iterative and flexible and fits into other methodologies you may already use. It’s also collaborative and fosters a shared understanding of the problem space. Importantly, it also mitigates risks, which ultimately means releasing a product people actually want onto the market and decreasing wasted time and resources.

Throughout the Double Diamond process, designers are also encouraged to look at the feasibility and impact the solution will have on the broader success of the org, leading to a healthier bottom line and strengthened business overall.