Designers make decisions every day, every hour, every minute. Each experience, journey, interaction, shape, layout, content, font, colour, animation has to be the most relevant and meaningful to users. How do we drive creativity towards impactful decisions?
It won't come as a surprise: for decisions to stick, they need to address a need, whether it's recognised or unmeet, with the overarching goal of delivering value.
At the heart of driving this value lies intent - our guiding 'North Star' that anchors every decision we make. This intent serves as the destination driving each step we take as a team in our creative journey.
To visualise the decision path we take to build purposeful services and products, I’m proposing the Quadruple Diamond.
We knew about the Double Diamond design process, potentially the Triple Diamond. But a Quadruple Diamond? As a designer and a team leader, I found that we need to address four stages: Strategy, Discovery, Delivery and Operations. All follow similar principles of converging and diverging.
Mature organisations that innovate have design practitioners evolving in all those stages. The Strategy and Operations are stages that actually drive maximum impact. The Double Diamond process is the one that builds the features and products. However, how do we know we’re building the right ones, and we are driving value?
During my career, I've witnessed designers working on the wrong problems, unleashing their creativity in the double diamond space but without delivering tangible value. This led to over-investment in design or designers spending too much time educating their stakeholders.
The Quadruple Diamond focuses on articulating how to drive value with design. It is also meant to evaluate an organisation’s maturity towards design, by clearly framing where designers are operating.