How do UX research frameworks inform your design strategy?

Most UX practitioners doing Lean UX do it because they feel they have no choice but to put speed before quality. Most of us would rather not run with assumptions and hope later that they were correct. Lean UX isn't ideal for much, and I often find it to be neither Lean nor UX. Lean is about reducing defects and delivering more value to customers. We can't do that if we are creating defects by running with opinions, guesses, and assumptions. This article is about research. Lean UX often wants you to skip research to go with your gut or what the team thinks it knows. If you care about research, then you probably aren't doing Lean UX. And it's not a research framework, period. It appears to be an "avoid early research" framework.

One unique aspect of Lean UX is its emphasis on collaboration, fast iteration, and a focus on outcomes over deliverables. Unlike traditional UX design processes that may produce extensive documentation, Lean UX promotes a more dynamic and agile approach.

Strategy is often used as a replacement for the word 'plan'. A Design Strategy should imply how you approach Design to be competitively different from your competitors. Do you collect user stories better than your competition? Do you process this information more quickly than others? This helps reframe this question: How does using UX frameworks help in a Design Strategy? Frameworks as a single tool to guide your plans are only as useful if used with competitive research.

When working in Lean UX, cultivate a collaborative mindset among cross-functional teams, including designers, developers, product managers, and stakeholders. Encourage open communication channels to ensure everyone understands the project's objectives. Begin by crafting a shared understanding of the problem space, employing techniques like empathy mapping.

Couldn't agree more! UX research frameworks are like the compass that guides our design journey. Over my years in the field, I've found that having a well-defined framework not only streamlines the research process but also ensures that the resulting design decisions are grounded in real user insights. It's all about aligning our creative process with user needs and expectations. If anyone is interested in diving deeper into the topic or needs recommendations on specific frameworks, feel free to reach out. Let's keep elevating the UX game! 👍

Have you heard of the Triple Diamond? It's a new perspective on the Double Diamond and as a designer, I think it's important to follow up on projects to ensure successful integration and delivery. I highly recommend checking out an insightful article from Zendesk (just do a quick Google search!).

Double Diamond is a derivate of HCD. I wish more people knew about HCD. Also, if you are not investing time, qualified researchers, and resources into great research, it won't matter which pretty picture you've chosen and claim as your framework.

The Double Diamond framework offers a structured yet flexible approach to tackling complex, open-ended problems in UX design. Its four-phase model—Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver—provides a roadmap that can balance creativity with feasibility. While at DesignPeer, where I work as a product designer, we don't strictly adhere to one framework; Double Diamond has been particularly useful when it aligns with a project's unique challenges. We consider each project unique and select the framework that best suits its specific needs. Double Diamond helps ensure that we're generating creative solutions and aligning them with user needs and business goals, making it a valuable tool in our toolkit.

Double Diamond is a UX design framework that represents the divergent and convergent phases of the design process, helping teams explore a problem space and then narrow down to a solution.

JTBD isn't a research framework. Oh, AI. I have heard some JTBD authors and trainers say that research is optional. I'd disagree, but I also prefer task analysis over JTBD. JTBD won't help you uncover anything about anybody. It's all about the research you have done. If you create JTBD documentation or maps, but it's based on opinions, guesses, and assumptions, then it's not evidence-based.

لا يعتبر JBTD من أساليب العمل في الأبحاث، ولكنه قد يكون مفهوم مفيد لفرق العمل الحديثة والتي تغيب عنها عادة استراتيجيات المنشأة وفهم القطاع والمنتج المقدم للعميل، فيساعدهم في التفكير بالوظيفة المنجزة من العميل؛ على خدمته في انجازها بطريقة افضل. ولن يتعرف الفريق على «افضل الطرق» أو الوظائف المنجزة من استخدام المنتج إلا عن طريق الأبحاث. لذلك لا يعتبر هذا النموذج من الاساليب البحثية، بل يميل لكونه منظور في تطوير المنتجات وتجربة المستخدم، وله مزاياه وعيوبه، واستخداماته ومحدودياته.

Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is more of a research methodology or lens to view user needs than a full-fledged framework like the Design Thinking process or Double Diamond. It's often used in the "Empathize" and "Define" stages of the Design Thinking process to understand better what users are trying to achieve. What excites me about JTBD is its focus on uncovering the 'job' users are hiring a product to do. This understanding allows us to craft solutions that are not just functional but emotionally resonant. It's an invaluable tool for digging deep into user needs, setting the stage for a design that solves their problems.

مفهوم محورية المستخدم يقدّم منظور مختلف للأعمال والشركات، وهو أحد أعمدة تطوير تجربة المستخدم. التركيز على المستخدمين يساعد الباحث والمصمم للوصول لفهم عميق لدوافع المستخدمين ورغباتهم واحتياجاتهم، ولتوظيف هذا الفهم لتعظيم منفعة المنشأة. ومع ذلك يتجاوز الكثير من المختصين هذا المفهوم، ويستبدلونه "بالتعاطف" المبني على التخمينات والإحساس، بدل أن يبنى على المعلومات والحقائق. ويكون عادةً لقلة الخبرة، أو الجهل بما قد يتبع "التسليك" في تطوير المنتجات للاطلاق في أسرع وقت.

Now we're getting warmer. UCD is an actual UX process that not only includes research but starts with it. We start with learning before we guess, build, or come up with solutions. You are unlikely to create the best solutions and customer value without early knowledge, especially evidence that replaces opinions, guesses, and assumptions.

One important thing to keep in mind whenever anyone brings up UCD. We (Designers) are often not the users we are designing for.

UCD places a strong emphasis on actively engaging users at every stage of the design process, this continuous user involvement helps ensure that the resulting product or service is tailored to the actual needs and preferences of the target audience. It goes beyond just usability testing; it’s about integrating users into the design team as partners, ensuring that their insights and perspectives are at the core of every design choice. This collaborative approach can lead to more user-friendly and effective solutions.

Love UCD! Optimizing the experience for the user at every step is the key to building products that people love. I believe UCD really shines when it unites an overarching user-centered philosophy, intentional UX writing, and intuitive design.

Design Thinking is not UX. It doesn't contain any UCD principles and processes. Design Thinking has been force-fitted to try UX projects, that started impacting the UX industry today with major speculations, assumptions, biases and loopholes. People are talking generically about innovations, embracing uncertainty, ambiguity and design thinking as an intellectual workmanship kind without any clarity of thoughts. There are 10 different design thinking processes exist and none of them backed with the UCD principles and processes. UCD principles and processes are evidence-based and genuinely structured for the disciplined practicing profession as it helps in rationalizing and reasoning out in every stage of execution.

Design Thinking needs to evolve by emphasising empathy as the driving force rather than just a step in the beginning. While it might seem like it successfully addresses problems with smaller scopes, a seasoned UX practitioner would use the more practical User-Centered Design (UCD) process to tackle complex problems. Relying on Design Thinking to solve complex organisational or product concerns is impractical and often just a facade of being human-centric as it ignores considering factors like assessing UX maturity before its application. It oversimplifies design processes and promotes democratisation while falling short when faced with nuanced and unique scenarios, highlighting the importance and letting UCD emerge as a more viable option.

Think of design thinking like a toolkit for UX designers. It helps them really get into users' shoes, come up with creative solutions, and test them out. It's like their secret recipe for making products that people love to use.

The framework, I use most often is Design of Experiments (DOE). Though originally conceived of for statistical research, it is helpful way of approaching all UX research. This framework starts with the stakeholders' goals (i.e., decisions to be made) and the constraints (time, resources, access to users, technological limitations, etc). Based on the goals and constraints, the researcher defines the data to be collected (measures, behaviours to be observed, thoughts to be recorded, etc) from whom, in what conditions, etc... Allowing the researcher to hypothesize about how changes in conditions might impact the results.

The more important thing is designing for users need it doesn't matter what framework or process you're using if you're main focus is on the user.