That’s Damien Newman’s process of design. It may be crude, but it’s absolutely clear: the unknown heading into Research leads to the sparks of Ideation and culminates with the clarity and details of Design.
While being a universal axiom of both art and design—we all start in a fog as we attempt to narrow down to any clear form of visual or behavioral expression—what it doesn’t begin to touch upon are the moving parts found within the various methods that we must employ in order to participate within & contribute to a product development team.
I’ve been thinking about the evolution of my own creative method for a while now, as I’ve moved from personal expression to participating within and creating Design methodologies for both start-up & large organizations over a 20+ year-long career. So if you’re inclined to join me on this journey, be warned up-front: I’m going to start at the beginning and that goes way back.
Being an Artist
Before art school, I was a “drawer”—I’d go directly to pad with either pencil or rapidograph, often to remove cognitive processing altogether with blind contour drawings; my portfolio for art school was filled with them. The subject matter was mine to define, and I finished when I felt it was complete.
As I became more focused on the craft of illustration, I’d spend time ideating through the subject matter and prepping for the pen to paper in a number of ways—from taking photographs to sketching to cutting images out of magazines. If the illustration was for a class or a client, I’d invest as much time conceptualizing as would illustrating. This was the moment where my creative process evolved to include other people’s input for the first time.
Undergrad Advertising Design
My illustration focus at Crouse College quickly took a turn to advertising design, and with it a whole new set of challenges were introduced.
We discussed faux business objectives and campaign parameters in studio, and then sequestered ourselves to research, sketch and write copy. Relatively quickly, we’d return to class to present three concepts and receive a full-on design critique. Repeat, narrow down, complete. It may not sound like much at first, but being able to clearly pitch an idea, and then take criticism as constructive rather than negative, is almost as important as the ideation process itself.
Towards the end of my undergrad career, we began to collaborate with Newhouse copy writers, prepping us for the machinations of a real world creative team (I never pursued a traditional print & tv agency career). With no developers in the mix, this was a commercial design process, but one with greater degrees of complexities than illustration when it came to client input and iterations towards sign-off.
Game Design
Directly after undergraduate, I spent my days designing CD-rom games after landing an internship at a design and production studio. The biggest contrast between then and now is that the notion of a downloadable patch or a version update simply didn’t exist. We were pre-web, so production houses didn’t staff and operate with the concern that developers constantly needed to be busy shipping product.
We began each project with a single, clear goal of burning a gold disk to take to a reproduction house on a specific date far off in the future. There was no iterative approach, no outcome to meet other than great reviews. We were 100% big bang.
Our creative process looked something like the following:
- the writer develops a linear script
- our team translated it into a non-linear, node-based script and made material changes as necessary
- we storyboarded key frames and the interaction model
- environment, sprites, and animations were identified
- we then focused on final animations and artwork
As we made progress, the development team would ramp up their technical requirements and begin to shape their architecture; new details from the design team would impact their approach and they’d iterate accordingly. We would intensely collaborate, and the engineers prototyped both good and throwaway code. The process felt much more like collaboration found in film production than a web-based product.
Our reputations and compensation were dependent on releasing a finished product that actually found a market. We were 100% outcome based. Our distribution partner placed the product into the limited sales channels that existed prior to the robust long-tail of online retail, so we only had one chance to make a impression with both reviewers and customers.
If you ever see me twitch when an MVP is mentioned, that’s simply muscle memory from a product age long ago.
Agency Life
As east coast game production dried up, I transitioned to the web and cut my teeth within a couple of agencies; first as an interactive art director, and then as an information architect.
- The creative process as an IAD was somewhat similar to undergrad—though pitches and critiques absolutely stepped up in intensity—and my experience in the gaming world prepped me for collaborating with a development team. Similar to gaming, online campaigns, websites, screensavers, etc. were a first impression pursuit— the notion of iterative updates was nascent in adoption.
- As an IA, the work was much more focused on defining and then translating requirements into sketches, schemas, taxonomies, etc., but the ideation, presentation and executing processes were highly similar. The “new” element was the explicit notion of documenting user requirements as a point in the process. Functional requirements (user + business + technical) and strategy docs were the foundation for how we ideated solutions
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< An Aside of Thoughts About Agency Life >
In the late nineties, when agencies were in the luxurious position to offer soup to nuts services, development teams didn’t have the agency to drive innovation as they enjoy today. Engineers were explicitly beholden to the client initiative, which didn’t align with launching experiments in-market due to the economics of the time and our collective understanding of the medium. Aside from collaboration around information architecture and design deliverables, engineering innovation was boxed within the core vision of the client, the strategy team’s position paper, and the design process.
Only the best of the best shops could honestly tout a record of pushing the boundaries of the medium with their work, and those shops were doing it with top notch collaboration and deep client partnerships. My time spent time at Organic exemplified such a business environment. These days, firms such as IDEO and frog have diversified with such quality and talent that they can demand the proper price to bring innovation to the table.
Conversely, smaller studios and boutiques have to be creative in how they sell themselves, otherwise they fall into a game of pitching beyond their capabilities. Clients may invest upfront to bring in a shop to provide specific thinking—forever the value of an external team—but businesses are leaning more and more on newly formed in-house product design teams to take on the majority of design thinking and execution capabilities.
While full lifecycle innovation is difficult in the agency space, outside consulting can fosterinnovation within this climate through ideation around notions such as brand experience development, ideation workshopping, and targeted behavioral and industrial design approaches. The challenge ahead for studios will be to move to a business model and underlying IP creation method that can adapt to the shifting world around them to redefine a. what innovation looks like and b. how an external team can provide it with clear and understandable ROI.
</ An Aside of Thoughts About Agency Life >
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Engineering Leading; Engineering Billing
After stopping by for the tail-end of a startup experience (Tripod)—where method wasn’t much of a focus—I experienced working within a development-centric organization for the first time. As the Chief Information Architect of a consultancy spun off from a global IT shop, my charge was rather specific—to develop an information architecture practice within a creative team methodology that was flexible and scalable, and could roll out across all of our domestic offices.
Aside from forming strong allies with creative directors in each office—which became a difficult line to toe as they (understandably) felt comfortable running their own teams as they saw fit—the largest problem I faced was that ancillary teams (business analysts and developers, in particular) operated in an object-oriented, UML methodology where “user needs” was a poorly tracktable notion. Engagements began with client-focused JAD meetings that lasted days, sometimes weeks, and stacks of business and development documentation were produced for the project’s build.
I’m sure good thinking came out of those sessions, but it looked like ceremony for ceremony’s sake, especially as I came to understand that the majority of the work turned out to be websites with less than innovative aspirations, degrees of difficulty, or complex user needs. The scale and complexity of the challenge ahead of me was clear.
My primary goal out of the gate was to figure out how to get tech management on-board with user-centered design in the midst of client engagements kicking-off across the country. After rounds of discussions outside and within the context of active projects, I realized that IA had to own as much of the actor-driven UML documentation as possible or we would have no leg to stand on when delivering user-centered experiences to our clients.
While we were successful in taking ownership of certain aspects of the process—from key insertion points to deliverables—we just couldn’t nudge the overall methodology, which was a nightmare.
As our team attempted deeper degrees of change, our efforts quickly became a game of tug of war with management. This was the time we lived in (2001)—many of my design peers were experiencing similar struggles with development-centric organizations across the industry. The attempt to convince an entrenched executive technology staff that Design needed to have a seat upstream to inform development of what users needed, even with wins in tow, quickly devolved into a street fight.
Technical documentation = billable hours.
Looking back, the daily struggle for optimizing how Design fit into a potential innovative space created a blind spot for me to the possibilities of more collaborative opportunities. Maybe we could’ve figured out a pre-Lean UX / Agile approach, or complimented JAD with design activities. At the end of the day, I believe our intent was good—we wanted to build trust and deliver highly useful work—but we were too early to a philosophical problem that not enough people had yet encountered with clarity.
Over the next five years, I unceremoniously took on the role of being a change agent for Design, which unbeknownst to me at the time was as important to me as producing innovative work.
Product Design Where No One Considered Product As A Thing
In the period following my uphill battle within the IT world, and just prior to the rapid evolution of Extreme Programming & Goal-Directed Design, I took a position to design streaming applications in the financial industry—well before the FinTech descriptor was anointed. Not only was this particular domain ripe for Design to impact innovation, but the financial industry as a whole was a chasm for our craft to fill.
As with my previous stop, it took results to seal the deal of institutional change.
Over the three years that I was in the employ of Datek / Ameritrade, Design moved from a position of downstream application to an upstream presence that impacted every aspect of the brand made available to the public. But to describe our methodology in a simple sentence just isn’t possible.
Both firms knew they were providing a service to their clients, but at the highest positions internally the authenticated space simply wasn’t perceived as what we commonly understand Product to be today. It was treated as the “flip side” of the marketing layer; the logged-in space that pushed traffic to pages or applications that triggered trading charges.
When Ameritrade bought Datek, the Business provided Development with direction that prioritized desired projects and Marketing was accustomed to providing all visual assets when applicable. After successfully navigating the domain for a few years, I positioned myself to staff a UX Design team to design a new trading platform after a deep, collaborative analysis of user needs.
The Active trader platform, Apex, was born and we had real, innovative work to do.
While our process was more waterfall than not, the front-end engineers were in our group (UX) and they were constantly prototyping our designs for user testing and skeleton development. Looking back, I considered us to be the D in an early EPD team, with the evolutionary notion of Product still stuck between the business analyst and project management roles.
Without this team approach, waterfall would’ve stopped development in their tracks, but our collaboration was top-notch. At any given time we had 10-15 active projects prior to the era of collaborative platforms (e.g. Basecamp). Our productivity would’ve grounded to a halt if it weren’t for how well our internal processes adapted to produce both on-time and above expectations.
We pushed forward within a Goal-Directed Design framework to innovate an experience designed specifically to support scenarios particular to our active trading clients. The opportunity to apply human-centered design thinking in a broader manner was limited by our place at the bottom of the engineering reporting structure.
True collaboration between Design, Development & Business had a ways to go.
Calling The Shots, And Not
For much of the past ten years, I operated a design shop that would flex in size depending on the opportunities in front of me. Similarly, the particular engagements I landed (and the domains behind them) greatly influenced the process and methods available for me to employ.
Example: Over two years, I engaged with a huge player in the media industry, Scripps Networks, building out my FT distributed team to six to completely re-imagine how they published to their online brands, which received millions of views per day.
Our design process with the internal project management and development teams was steeped in an early-stage (2007) Agile method with a blend of GDD, as we needed to understand and meet the needs of a cross section of internal users—editors, designers, media buyers and product management. It also had the challenging objective to be generic enough to be used by teams across multiple brands publishing to differing front-end templates.
After beginning the gig with a round of research to understand the role-based needs of the product, we kicked off the work by identifying key scenarios to pursue, beginning with the “publish and edit article” scenario.
My team, located across the US and the UK, would hold our own daily scrum each morning prior to joining in for the client scrum in the afternoon. We (myself, the PM and dev lead) discussed where we were in designing for the scenario in play, and what we’d complete over the following three week period. We would sketch, review, and specify, and then work with dev.
As this was an internal application for a high-profile brand, a certain degree of politics limited our iterative learning capabilities. If I were in-house, I probably would’ve engaged harder to make such learning a reality. As a consultant, I did the best I could delivering what we had promised to deliver.
The lesson from that experience is that methodology decisions matter, as method—how we choose to collaborate, research, iterate, prioritize, be agile, etc.—directly impacts the creation of a useful experience for actual human beings.
Design Thinking With A Side Of Innovation?
We began with a process of design, which seems ridiculously simple looking back across this essay, and here I am, fully taking in how much I’ve had to adapt to my environment over the years to survive, let alone thrive.
While I’ve operated in a manner to nudge others to shift their perspective on how to work with Design over the past 20 years, the evolution of my understanding of Design, and how it fits across industries, form factors, and customer types has immensely changed as well.
Just as business leaders shift their operational tactics as the world evolves around them, we designers must also evolve in order to produce quality work in an ever-shifting technological environment with varying expectations from users in market to business partners alike.
My d/Design interests have never led me to submitting entries in an awards chase. I don’t care about accolades; I care about results. My interests lay squarely in the realm of leading a team of practitioners, contributing to an excellent product vision, understanding human needs, innovating solutions, and executing designs to the point of wild success.
What method gets me there is still yet to be defined… as it should be.
