Topic
Process & strategy
Good design isn’t just what you see on screen; it’s how you got there and how you keep it consistent as it grows. Process and strategy are the meta layer - the frameworks for deciding what to build and the systems that stop it drifting as it scales. Try each concept in action here.
This cluster steps back from individual interfaces to the scaffolding around them: ways of framing the work like the double diamond, and ways of scaling decisions like design tokens. Less glamorous than a slick demo, but it is what separates a tidy prototype from a product that stays coherent.
Each entry makes the abstract concrete - you move through the phases, or watch one change ripple through a system - so the framework reads as a tool rather than a diagram on a slide.
The process & strategy entries 9
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process & strategy
Double diamond
The double diamond model shows design as two diamonds: the first explores then defines the right problem, the second explores then delivers the right solution. Each diamond opens wide before narrowing to a point.
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process & strategy
Design tokens
Design tokens are named values for the small decisions a design repeats - colours, spacing, corner radius, type sizes - stored once and referenced everywhere. Change the token and everything built from it changes at once.
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process & strategy
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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process & strategy
User journey map
A user journey map lays out the steps someone takes to reach a goal and plots how they feel at each one. The feeling is the point: it turns a flat list of stages into a curve where the low spots - the moments worth fixing - stand out.
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process & strategy
User persona
A user persona is a short, research-based profile of a representative user - their goals, context, and frustrations - given a name and a face. It turns the vague, shifting idea of 'the user' into one specific person you can design for.
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process & strategy
UX vs UI
UI is the surface - the visible, interactive layer you see and touch: colours, type, buttons, layout. UX is the entire experience of using the thing, including screens and everything around them: finding it, the flow, the wait, the recovery when it goes wrong. UI is part of UX, not a synonym for it.
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process & strategy
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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process & strategy
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 something once, use it everywhere, change it in one place.
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process & strategy
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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Know these already? Take the process & strategy quiz, or revise the terms with flashcards.