Design frameworks: what are they, and why you should be using them
Learn how frameworks can benefit your product design process.
A design framework is a practice that facilitates innovation and learning. It provides teams with tools and techniques for solving problems, guiding solutions, and building better experiences.
Frameworks are similar to cooking recipes: they provide the cook with instructions, including a list of ingredients to create a specific outcome. Although the cook can adjust the process to suit personal needs, unintended consequences can occur by not carefully following the prescribed, tested steps.
Some of the world’s leading brands, such as Apple, Google, and Samsung, have rapidly adopted frameworks, such as Double Diamond and Design Thinking, for product innovation. But why are these practices so popular?
Why do we need frameworks?
The product design and development process can be complex. When faced with many challenges, teams need structure and techniques to help define, build, test, and iterate the right ideas. By adopting frameworks, teams can better understand the problems and identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent.
Frameworks help structure the process, spark innovation, and stimulate collaboration. They are essential building blocks for guiding design solutions.
Now let’s look under the hood to learn more about the benefits of using design frameworks…
Frameworks help structure the problem-solving process
The end-user and business can benefit from frameworks: they provide teams with core principles for delivering solutions that solve problems for real people and achieve commercial objectives.
Frameworks provide structure, guide design solutions, and encourage teams to explore issues more deeply and take focused action. And what’s more, they offer flexibility to gather new insights and make iterations at any stage in the project.
When a design is failing to meet user and business needs, or if it’s exhausting too much time and resources, it’s most likely because the team isn’t following a framework. The results include incorrect assumptions, forced decisions, skewed requirements, and an end product that’s unfit for user purposes.
Frameworks spark innovation
When teams adopt frameworks, they can develop new ways of thinking to design better solutions, services and experiences that solve current problems. Other than tech companies, retail brands have benefited from applying design and development practices to inspire creativity and experimentation.
For example, Nordstrom, an American clothing brand, applied Design Thinking to innovate a user-first product. A team spent a week in their flagship store and used real customers to help build their app. They used paper-based prototypes to learn about behaviours and iterated until they defined a fully-functional product that people wanted.
Frameworks are a collaborative tool
Regardless of the person’s or team’s discipline and requirements, they are all involved in the same process and pursue the same final goal: the product’s future success. Each of them manages frameworks differently, but collaboration is what lets them all reach the desired objective.
Frameworks encourage teams to define, communicate, and collaborate as a network of stakeholders. And each of them possesses a shared stake in goals, processes, and metrics.
Team collaboration is not just about the steps and status of tasks. It is also about the operating environment where people can make local decisions while viewing others’ actions and goals.
Tips for choosing a framework
Choosing a framework requires understanding the problem complexity, people, resources, and the organisation’s culture. If you’re new to using frameworks, then use the common practice, see what works and doesn’t, and on this basis, find the right one for solving your problem.
Do some groundwork. The first tip is to do some groundwork on your business needs. Learn more about the project itself, objectives, the complexity of the problem, and the structure of the team and organisation. Only then you’ll understand what framework to adopt.
Assess the performance within the chosen framework. This way, you’ll avoid the pitfalls of sticking to the wrong process. What works and what doesn’t? Are you learning anything along the way? Regular retrospective sessions can be instrumental. Remember: all teams’ perspectives should be aligned, and everyone should get value from using a particular framework.
Be flexible. Make sure you have spare backup strategies and frameworks up your sleeve to tackle unexpected challenges quickly. Like Design Thinking that can help solve a problem within a short time frame.
Frameworks to get you started
With so many frameworks to choose from, these particular well-known practices can help structure a process, spark innovation, and stimulate cross-team collaboration…
Double Diamond
Explore issues more widely or deeply to achieve innovation
The Double Diamond is a divergence and convergence model proposed in 1996 by Hungarian-American linguist Béla H. Bánáthy. Fast-forward to 2005; the British Design Council popularised it as a framework for innovation to help designers and non-designers tackle problems. As the name suggests, the framework is structured as two separate diamonds, each containing four phases:
- Discover. In the first diamond, teams diverge to understand the problem. Rather than make assumptions, they’ll observe or speak with real people to develop empathy.
- Define. Teams then converge and use insight gathered from discovery to define the problem.
- Develop. In the second diamond, teams diverge once again to explore different solutions for solving the problem. They may seek inspiration from elsewhere and co-design with other people.
- Deliver. At the final stage, teams converge to test different solutions, rejecting those that don’t work and iterating those that will.
The universally accepted practice uses different work principles — collaboration, creative thinking and refinement of ideas. Each of them allows you to identify where you currently are in the product design and development cycle and iterate solutions until the problem is solved.
Design Thinking
Create rapid solutions for problems within five different phases
Design Thinking is an iterative process of understanding and solving problems. Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon introduced it in ‘The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969’. Since then, some of the world’s leading brands have adopted the framework for innovating solutions to meet specific user needs.
Design Thinking contains five phases:
- Empathise. Observe and develop an understanding of your target user’s needs and problems.
- Define. Use insights from empathy to create problem statements to be solved.
- Ideate. Challenge assumptions and develop innovative solutions to solve the problem.
- Prototype. Build flat or functioning designs to bring solutions to life.
- Test. Validate ideas by testing them with real users.
We can perceive each Design Thinking phase as principles contributing to an innovative project. Although the stages appear as a linear process, you may visit any one of them at any time: for example, iterate your prototype based on feedback from testing.
Hook Model
Design for long-term behaviours and habit-forming products
Created by consumer psychology expert Nir Eyal, the Hook Model teaches us how we can change behaviours ethically and positively for people. Whether we’re looking to make or break habits, the Hook Model is a fascinating framework for behavioural change.
The Hook Model aims to create a habit-forming technology that provides some relief. Creating a source of alleviation will drive continued use of the product or service and ultimately increase the customer lifetime value (CLV).
To create a habit-forming product using the Hook Model, we can design for four critical phases:
- Trigger. It exists in the environment (external) or the self (internal) and is associated with an action. For example, your smartphone stimulates your attention in many ways, including pings, buzzes, and feeds.
- Action. The critical behaviour you want users to perform. It could be opening a push notification or entering your daily calorie intake in your health and fitness app.
- Variable reward. An unpredictable, positive consequence of the action performed by the user. For example, you unexpectedly receive a delightful message of praise for completing a task.
- Investment. Critical for building habit-forming technologies. It adds long-term value to a product or service and is what helps increase the CLV.
When users go through all four phases of the Hook Model, they will begin to associate the product or service as the source of relief. That is when they form a habit.
Learn more about using the Hook Model for creating habit-forming products.
Wrapping up frameworks
Frameworks are essential for structuring the process, sparking innovation, and stimulating collaboration. They provide teams with the tools and techniques to design and iterate the right solutions.
No matter how large or small the business you work for, frameworks are for anyone. Understand the different practices with their core principles, advantages and disadvantages. And learn as much as possible from them.
If you’re new to frameworks, give them a try; you’ll be surprised by the positive outcomes, not just for you but for others.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments: I’d like to hear your thoughts on frameworks and any others worth using.
Special mentions
- Double Diamond — Design Council
- Design Thinking — Interaction Design Foundation
- Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products — Nir Eyal
- Story-based on an interview with Susanna Agababyan
