Process · Point of view
How I Think
& Approach
Design
Design is a process.
The real world rarely is.
My approach is rooted in a version of the Double Diamond. But I’ve never experienced great product design as a perfectly linear process.
The Process
- Research
- Ideate
- Design
- Test
- Build
- ∞
The first part establishes the foundation. After that, the product becomes a continuous cycle of learning, making, testing, and improving.
That’s the ideal.
The ideal
A process you get to run from the beginning.
Foundation first. Then a loop that keeps tightening as the product meets real people.
The reality
Agency life is often different.
You don’t always get to start at the beginning.
- Sometimes you’re brought in to define the strategy.
- Sometimes the strategy already exists and you’re asked to turn it into an experience.
- Sometimes there are wireframes but no visual system.
- Sometimes you’re dropped directly into a product that is already being built and asked to solve a very specific problem.
I’ve spent most of my career in the strategy and experience side of agency work, so I’ve learned to operate across that entire spectrum.
How I enter a project
Like a special forces team: understand the terrain quickly, determine what already exists, identify what’s missing, and attack the part of the problem you’re there to solve.
- 01Understand the terrain
- 02Determine what exists
- 03Identify what’s missing
- 04Attack the problem
The process matters. But knowing where you are in the process matters just as much.
Start With What We Know
Even when I’m brought directly into design, I don’t believe design should begin with a blank canvas.
I want to understand the thinking that got us there.
That may mean reviewing
- 01Business and product strategy
- 02Existing research
- 03Personas and audience archetypes
- 04Customer journeys
- 05Analytics
- 06Competitive research
- 07Brand strategy
- 08Existing design systems
- 09Previous concepts and prototypes
- 10Technical constraints
If those things exist, they become inputs into the work.
If they don’t, we establish as much of that foundation as the project allows.
The amount of research changes.
The need for understanding doesn’t.
Strategy
Understand the landscape before deciding where to go.
Strategy is where we create the foundation for the experience. When I’m brought into a project at the strategy level, one of the first things I want to understand is the ecosystem around the organization.
- Who are the competitors?
- What standards have customers already been taught to expect?
- Where is everyone doing the same thing?
- Where are the opportunities to do something meaningfully better?
Competitive analysis is rarely about copying competitors. It’s about understanding the landscape well enough to know where the client belongs within it and where they have permission to be different.
From there, research takes whatever form the problem requires.
Typical strategy activities
-
01
Competitive Analysis
Understand the category, competitors, conventions, gaps, and opportunities.
-
02
Internal Research
Stakeholder interviews, workshops, organizational knowledge, existing analytics, business objectives, technical realities, and institutional expertise.
-
03
External Research
Customer interviews, behavioral research, market research, usability findings, search behavior, and other inputs depending on the problem.
-
04
Personas & Archetypes
Turn research into useful models of the people we’re designing for.
-
05
Journeys
Understand what people are trying to accomplish, where friction exists, and where the experience can create value.
-
06
Digital Strategy
Bring those inputs together into a clear direction that can move forward into product and experience design.
The output of strategy isn’t a pile of documents.
It’s clarity about what we should build and why.
Experience / UX
Turning strategy into form.
This is where the ethereal blah blah blah of strategy has to become something real.
Strategy may tell us
Customers need greater confidence before making a decision.
Experience design has to answer
Okay. What does the product actually do about that?
Translating strategic ideas into
We’re beginning to expose the ribs of the product. At this stage, I want to answer the difficult structural questions without being distracted by whether something looks beautiful yet.
- What belongs here?
- What happens when I click this?
- What’s most important?
- What comes next?
- What information does someone need before making this decision?
- How does this feature actually support the strategy?
By separating these questions from visual design, we can make important product decisions based on behavior, hierarchy, usefulness, and intent rather than aesthetics.
A caveat
UX and UI don’t always need a wall between them.
The process changes when a mature design system already exists. If the visual language, components, interaction patterns, and brand standards have already been established, there may be little value in creating grayscale wireframes simply because that’s what the traditional process says comes next.
In those situations, I often work in a hybrid UX/UI mode. We can solve experience problems using real components and actual interface patterns while still asking fundamentally UX questions.
The artifact isn’t the point. Making the right decision is the point.
Visual Design
Make the experience unmistakably belong to the brand.
My philosophy on visual design is not simply to make an interface look good. It’s to take an organization’s brand ethos and translate it into a digital product.
Before designing, I consume the brand.
What I look at
Then I look outward.
I hunt for exceptional visual patterns across products, industries, editorial design, technology, architecture, culture, and places that may have nothing to do with the client’s category.
There is a certain amount of hunt and peck to great visual design.
- 01
You see something interesting.
- 02
You understand why it works.
- 03
You pull the underlying idea apart.
- 04
You reinterpret it through the client’s brand.
I’m not interested in copying the pattern. I’m interested in understanding what made it compelling and finding our version of it.
Taste is accumulated
Know the standard. Then push it.
Visual taste isn’t something you manufacture at the beginning of a project. It comes from years of seeing products that meet the standard, products that miss it, and products that push far beyond it. Eventually, you know what good looks like. That becomes the baseline.
Often the best ideas aren’t loud. They’re subtle decisions in typography, motion, composition, interaction, imagery, hierarchy, or behavior that make an experience feel distinctly like the organization behind it.
- We know the standard.
- We design to the standard.
- Then we push beyond it wherever the product and brand give us permission.
That’s where visual design becomes more than decoration. It becomes brand expression through product.
Build, Learn, Repeat
Design doesn’t end when the comps are approved.
Once something becomes real, we learn things we couldn’t learn while designing it.
- People use it.
- Technology pushes back.
- Business priorities change.
- New opportunities appear.
So we go around again.
- Ideate
- Design
- Test
- Build
- ∞
The goal isn’t to perfectly execute a process. The goal is to understand what the product needs next and have the range to meet it there.
The simplest way to say it
- Understand where we are.
- Understand why we’re here.
- Solve what’s in front of us.
- Build on what we learn.
- Keep going.