The tried-and-true design method that helps you ship

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Principles

Shared principles and clear roles are far more important than documents and process. Before you set up move on, talk to your team and get aligned on what you believe.

Directed Design asks participants to buy into one core principle:

Post up
This means put your work up on the wall. Designers are makers, we show more than we tell. When you have an idea, don't explain it—build it and let us see it!

Team

Teams work much better if everyone knows what's expected of them, and what to expect from everyone else.

Directed Design is built on three temporary roles, not job titles. These roles can change between projects.

  • Design lead - Responsible for delivering a solution that users will love.
  • Technical lead - Responsible for making sure our solution is feasible and maintainable.
  • Product owner - Responsible for ensuring our solution is viable for our business.

Lifecycle

In Directed Design, new features move through five distinct design phases:

  1. Lean customer discovery - get enough genuine understanding to build something amazing. Context is gathered in layers, not up-front all-at-once.
  2. Modeling and workflows - understand the world your users already live in, then create an abstract flow of the system you want to build
  3. Low-fidelity prototyping - make something tangible to solve the problem by mapping the model to UI components in space and time
  4. Evaluation - everything we build is an assumption. In this step, we find out if what we made is really the design we need, and adjust.
  5. Engineering support - pair with engineers to execute the final version together, thinking on your feet when small issues arise.

Artifacts

Everyone should always know where to find the latest design work, and understand the goal of our project. But we are not bookkeepers. If you use too many documents means nobody reads anything.

Directed Design requires only two places for design knowledge to live:

Design briefs - Before begining work on a project, we write down what we are trying to accomplish—without dictating the design up-front
Prototype - If a brief is a question, the prototype is the your answer. Every prototype is a proposal for how the product should change. Directed Design prototypes are focused on interactions, flows, and copy over color, type, and illustration.

Discussions

If we don't talk about design, our products cannot improve. However, too many meetings will slow us down.

Directed Design has only two essential discussions for every feature. Each of these meetings includes the entire development team.

Kickoffs give the designer everything they need to begin work. We review the design brief, generate as many ideas as possible, get engineers feedback, discuss pros and cons, plan technical feasibility spikes, and start designing.
Reviews give everyone a chance to understand and influence the design before it's complete. We review the brief, share the design work, review different directions, and take in feedback.

The book also includes are templates for three other important discussions:

  • Customer discovery interviews to understand the problems we're trying to solve
  • Lean usability tests to evaluate whether your design was successful
  • Design retrospectives to reflect on and improve the way we work and communicate


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