Process & strategy

The process & strategy entries 31

• process & strategy

  MVP (minimum viable product)

  An MVP is the smallest version of a product that still delivers real value to users and lets you learn whether your idea works - before you've built the whole thing. The point isn't to ship something cheap and broken; it's to ship the smallest complete, usable slice that tests your riskiest assumptions with real people, fast.

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  Wireframe

  A wireframe is a deliberately plain, low-fidelity blueprint of a screen - boxes, lines and placeholder text showing what goes where and how the structure works, with the visual design stripped out on purpose. By leaving out colour, imagery and polish, it keeps everyone focused on layout, hierarchy and flow before anyone argues about how it should look.

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  Prototype & fidelity

  A prototype is a working model of a design made to be tested, and fidelity is how closely it resembles the finished product. Low-fidelity prototypes (paper sketches, clickable wireframes) are rough, fast and cheap; high-fidelity ones (polished, interactive, near-real) look and behave like the real thing. Choosing the right fidelity for the question you're asking is the whole skill.

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  Double diamond

  The double diamond model presents design as two diamonds: the first explores and defines the right problem, the second explores and delivers the right solution. Each diamond widens before narrowing to a point.

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  User flow

  A user flow is a map of the path someone takes to complete a task in a product - each screen, action and decision point from start to goal. Drawn out as a diagram of steps and branches, it shows the whole journey at a glance, making it easy to spot unnecessary steps, dead ends and the places people are most likely to drop out.

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  Design tokens

  Design tokens are named values for design decisions like colours, spacing, corner radius, and type sizes - stored once and referenced everywhere. Change the token, and everything built from it updates at once.

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  Aha moment

  The aha moment is the point where a new user first genuinely experiences a product's core value - the "oh, I get it, this is useful" click. It's the moment that turns a curious sign-up into someone who understands why the product is worth their time, and reaching it quickly is one of the strongest predictors of whether they'll stick around.

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  Human-centred design

  Human-centred design (HCD) is an approach that grounds design in a deep understanding of the real people who will be affected by it - their needs, contexts and limitations - and improves the solution through repeated cycles of understanding, designing and evaluating with them. Instead of guessing or designing for yourself, you build around evidence of what people actually need.

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  Sitemap

  A sitemap is a diagram of a product's structure - its pages or screens arranged in a hierarchy that shows how they group and nest and how they relate to each other. It makes a site's information architecture visible at a glance, so you can see the whole organisation, judge whether it's logical, and spot where things are buried, duplicated or in the wrong place.

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  Atomic design

  Atomic design is a methodology for building interfaces from small, reusable parts that combine into bigger ones - a mental model borrowed from chemistry. The smallest pieces (atoms) combine into molecules, then organisms, then templates, then whole pages. It gives design systems a clear, consistent structure where everything is built from the same shared building blocks.

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  User-centred design

  User-centred design (UCD) is an approach that keeps the end user's needs, goals and context at the centre of every design decision, from start to finish. The opposite is designing around the business's goals, the technology, or the designer's own taste - all of which can produce something that works for everyone except the person actually using it.

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  Information architecture

  Information architecture is how a product’s content is organised, labelled and connected so people can find things and know where they are. It’s the floor plan beneath the interface - invisible when it works, maddening when it doesn’t.

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  Inclusive design

  Inclusive design is designing for the full range of human diversity - ability, language, age, culture, situation - so that more people can use a product, rather than designing for an imagined "average" user and excluding everyone who differs. A central insight is that solving for people at the edges often produces something better for everyone (the curb-cut effect).

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  UX honeycomb

  The UX honeycomb is Peter Morville's model breaking user experience into seven facets: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable. It's a reminder that good UX is more than usability - a product can be easy to use and still fail if it isn't useful, can't be found, isn't trusted, or doesn't deliver value.

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  The 5 Es of usability

  The 5 Es of usability are Whitney Quesenbery's framework breaking usability into five measurable dimensions: effective, efficient, engaging, error-tolerant and easy to learn. Together they turn the vague idea of "usable" into specific qualities you can design for and assess - and they show that usability is a balance, since these dimensions sometimes pull against each other.

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  Divergent & convergent thinking

  Divergent and convergent thinking are the two complementary modes design swings between. Divergent thinking opens up - generating many ideas, options and possibilities without judging them. Convergent thinking narrows down - evaluating, comparing and choosing among them. Good process deliberately separates the two, because trying to create and critique at the same time does both badly.

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  Design sprint

  A design sprint is a time-boxed process - classically five days - for answering a big product question by going from idea to a tested prototype in a week, without building the real thing first. Devised at Google Ventures, it compresses months of debate into a structured week: map the problem, sketch solutions, decide, build a realistic prototype, and test it with real users.

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  Service design

  Service design is designing the whole end-to-end experience of a service - across every channel, touchpoint and moment, and crucially the behind-the-scenes people, systems and processes that make it work. Where product UX focuses on the screen in front of you, service design zooms out to the entire journey, including everything the customer never sees.

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  Service blueprint

  A service blueprint is a diagram that maps a service across stacked layers - what the customer does, what they see and interact with (frontstage), what happens behind the scenes (backstage), and the support systems underneath - all lined up against the steps of the journey and divided by the line of visibility. It extends a journey map downward, exposing the staff, systems and processes that deliver each moment.

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  User journey map

  A user journey map shows the steps someone takes to reach a goal and how they feel at each one. Emotion turns a flat list into a curve, revealing the low points - the moments worth fixing. You can see and try this concept in action on this page.

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  Touchpoint

  A touchpoint is any point of contact between a person and a product, service or brand - an advert, the website, the app, an email, the packaging, a support call, even a review someone reads. The full experience is the sum of all these touchpoints over time, so consistency and quality across every one of them, not just the main interface, is what shapes how people feel about you.

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  Design critique

  A design critique is a structured session where a design is examined against its goals and the needs of its users, to surface strengths and problems and improve it. The key word is structured: a good critique is about whether the design solves the problem, grounded in objectives and evidence - not a round of personal opinions about what people happen to like.

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  Design debt

  Design debt is the accumulated cost of design shortcuts, inconsistencies and unaddressed problems that pile up over time and make a product harder to use and harder to change - the design equivalent of technical debt. Each quick fix or one-off component that doesn't fit the system is a small loan; unpaid, the interest compounds into an incoherent, brittle experience.

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  Handoff

  Handoff is the point where a design is passed to developers to build - along with the specifications, assets, states and intent they need to build it accurately. A good handoff transfers everything needed to implement the design faithfully and answers the questions developers will have; a poor one leaves gaps that get filled with guesses, so the built product drifts from the design.

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  Accessibility (overview)

  Accessibility (often shortened to a11y) means designing products so that people with the full range of abilities - including disabilities of vision, hearing, motor control and cognition - can perceive, operate and understand them. The WCAG standard frames it as four principles, POUR: content must be Perceivable, Operable, Understandable and Robust, for everyone, not just the able-bodied "average" user.

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  Stakeholder management

  Stakeholder management is the work of identifying everyone with an interest in or influence over a project - clients, executives, engineers, marketing, legal, and the users themselves - and engaging each appropriately so the work can succeed. For designers it's often the difference between good design that ships and good design that dies in a meeting, because the best solution still needs buy-in.

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  User persona

  A user persona is a concise, research-backed profile of a typical user - their goals, context, and frustrations - given a name and a face. It turns the vague idea of 'the user' into one specific person you can design for.

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  UX vs UI

  UI is the interface you see and interact with; UX is the broader experience before, during and after that interaction.

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  Design thinking

  Design thinking is a human-centred way to tackle messy problems: understand real people, sharply define their problem, generate lots of ideas, build rough prototypes and test them - looping back as you learn. The point is to start from the human, not the solution.

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  Design system

  A design system is the single source of truth for an interface: the design tokens, reusable components and written guidelines that let many people build a consistent product quickly. Define once, use everywhere, change in one place.

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  Jobs to be done

  Jobs to be done is the idea that people don't want your product, they want the progress it gives them - they "hire" it to do a job. Focus on the job, not the feature or the demographic, and you design for what people are actually trying to achieve.

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