I’m having trouble finding just the right visual representation for the current process I follow, so I thought I would just write this out and share it to work through it.
Nonlinearity
We live in a non-linear world, but almost every representation we use to talk about our practices, processes, etc get laid out linearly.
A typical good human centered design process:
Research -> Analysis/Synthesis -> Personas -> Future Vision -> High Level Design -> Detailed Design
A good lean startup process (taken from Justin Wilcox’s FOCUS framework):
1. Can you find early adopters trying to solve the problem you think they have? -> 2. Do they want your help solving it? -> 3. How much will they pay you to solve it? -> 4. Can you solve it? -> 5. Can you scale beyond earliest adopters, new channels, etc?
These are great process frameworks, but they are all too linear, or at least come off that way and inspire linear thinking and action.
I try to take inspiration from nature and how evolution leads to very decentralized, emergent forms and flows, so here is a stab at how I’ve been thinking of a more non-linear approach to design process (synthesizing the above frameworks along with similar ones, and of course heavy on the Story based ideas I think are so valuable).
Iterative Differentiation
One of the many great ideas from Christopher Alexander is “structure preserving transformations,” where as you’re designing, you apply a design pattern to whatever the next most important conflict between forces is (i.e. highest priority problem, unmet need/desire, etc).
His term “structure preserving transformation” means that you try not to break whatever good was going on before you make the next design decision; you “preserve” the wholeness that was there while making one next design decision. He talks about this as “differentiating” a portion of the space; he dealt with architecture, so space usually meant a 3 dimensional space literally, as well as the activity flows through it. For us, the flows can be through a literal space, an information space, or however you want to think of the contextual experiential flow of your product or service.
What he’s doing is iteratively differentiating from a concept of a set of problems to be solved towards a set of patterns that have been applied to create the overall solution. This is very much like how cells split and differentiate into a human from; we don’t get bolted together from organs, the cells differentiate over time and we get us.
That’s all a bit deep sounding, so here is how that idea plays out for me in design practice (which covers what many would call product management, research, design, etc).
Differentiation from “Story” to “the things”
I start with Story, and never let go. What some like to call “qualitative research,” I now tend to think of as collecting and analyzing stories about people’s current lives. Let’s say we start with a textual narrative about a few moments in a person’s current life:
Karen visits her doctor to ask about some issues and they run some tests. For the rest of the day, she keeps nervously checking her phone to see if there are any texts or emails from the doctor’s office. Now, it’s been two days and she hasn’t heard back from the doctor’s office. She’s feeling worried about what this might be. She takes the next day off from work to try to relax in the park, but feels worried the whole time.
Each of these textual narratives can usually be a page or two, so this would be one set of moments in a larger story that we break out as a high priority, and we want to “differentiate” just these moments; rather than saying we need to finish all “research” before moving on, we just want to go further on only these moments. The rest of the 2 page story can stay as text, but we only differentiate this portion into storyboards to get a deeper sense of empathy.
You can also visualize emotional story arcs to show how people feel at each moment; many people think of “plot arcs” (e.g., exposition, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement), but story arcs are about how people feel during these plot arc moments. You can plot story arcs against plot arcs, but here I’ll just show a simple story arc against a flat line added to the storyboard frames.
Now we can look for moments we want to differentiate further, again leaving alone the moments we don’t want to deal with yet (or ever). We look for areas that have possibilities for improvement in how people feel. Many say “pain points,” but you can just as well find a moment where people already feel great, and still improve it as the best opportunity for adding value. Therefore, rather than calling it a pain point, let’s just think of them all as opportunities to add value. In this example, we are looking at moments that are currently low in emotion.
We can differentiate the moment where Karen is waiting to hear back from the doctor’s office, iterating now from a story about current experience towards a better possible future. We have no idea yet what an actual solution might look like, but to keep this example brief, let’s say we assume an app of some sort, without assuming much about what the detailed interaction design or visual design would look like, only focus on what would be accomplished, and heavy focus on the OUTCOMES in Karen’s life that would matter to her, not the outputs we may create (product features).
Now similar to above, we can go through the board and show an updated emotional story arc against the previous existing moments. Keep in mind, we can make up this data from what we think (knowing we will measure it against reality in one of many ways), or we can wait to get some empirical data; this data can come from many methods, like having people read/look at these stories and measuring how they react (not what they say necessarily); you DO NOT need to build an app to predict future emotions about possible future experiences, that’s the value of using stories as prototypes!
A next iteration of differentiation might be to go further into interaction design for this app concept (IF we have empirical evidence that people even gave a crap about that moment when we measured their reaction to it), or we could differentiate a different area of the same story from text to storyboards, to some rough design decision like we did above.
Summary
This is just a small example, but I think it shows how we can move away from large phases/stages of design process, and instead look at iterating through small subsets. This example showed how to use different story representations to do this, differentiating from textual narrative, to storyboards, to rough interaction design framework levels. There are a few more levels, but the point is to use a lean mindset, going into higher fidelity just in time, not just in case. We want to focus on learning, always, and letting delivery of things/features fall out of the differentiation. A 2 page story may differentiate into a few features of a couple of new products, where half of that 2 page story stays as text, and the other page morphs over time into the actual products.
Please reach out at imagine@wondertron.com if you would like to try this with us for your company.