Innovation Strategy Toolkit
This toolkit was designed by Innovation Team in Global Strategy & Innovation at Falck, an organisation that provides healthcare and emergency response services. The primary goal of the kit was to identify relevant opportunities for the Innovation Team to work on. It is a great example of design teams creating their own tools to aid their design development process.
Introduction
Slick television and internet ads for website building and hosting packages make the design and development of digital products and services seem as easy as ordering a meal from a menu. These template-driven solutions certainly have appetising benefits in reducing the need for technical know-how and producing professional-looking designs with relative ease. However, underneath their mouth-watering surface, the main design challenge still awaits. The core design work in most digital projects is developing the content solution to address a problem rather than just its presentation.
This chapter dives below the surface to examine the various development methodologies and design processes that create digital products and services. The chapter is a natural extension of the previous chapter on ‘Research for interaction’ as the research and development are completely integrated within design. The only reason they are separated in this book is to give the diversity of research methods more attention and greater prominence. Therefore development sections in this chapter will refer back to the research methods discussed in the previous chapter.
The development process requires many activities and skills, from diagnostic problem solving and information organisation to creating design prototypes and user testing. In large digital agencies and in-house design teams, lots of specialists usually undertake the breadth of these activities. For example, it is not uncommon to see specialist design-related roles such as a UX researcher, information architect, UX designer, UI or visual designer and creative technologist. These roles are often combined in smaller design studios, so a designer takes on a broader range of tasks. For professional designers, is it usually a matter of personal preference whether they want to work in a large agency with a specialist role or a small studio with a diverse range of responsibilities. This chapter generally refers to ‘the designer’, assuming they will take on most design-related duties. However, more specialist roles such as ‘information architect’ are referred to from time to time.
The chapter stops short of the actual technical development of a digital product or service since this usually falls to specialist software developers to implement. Nevertheless, there is advice on pathways to development for design students and designers who want to progress their technical expertise by creating more straightforward websites at the end of the prototyping section in this chapter and in the final chapter on ‘Presenting your ideas’.
The final section in this chapter covers feedback and user-testing, which again works hand-in-hand with the previous chapter. User testing is a critical part of the design process and is not something that designers can leave to chance. The complexity of digital applications with different user needs, accessibility requirements, technical limitations, customisation and personalisation means that a design and development team cannot deliver a great user experience without thorough user testing. Indeed, since most businesses already have web presences and there are numerous apps for everything we currently need, there would be little need to commission new design unless feedback and user testing revealed opportunities for improvement. Therefore it is in designers’ personal and professional interests to learn and embrace feedback and user-testing as part of their natural design process.
Concept generation
Conceptual thinking is the ability to conceive ideas and select appropriate strategies for a given situation or problem. Conceptual thinking seeks to understand a situation and identify important underlying issues through the generation of problem-solving ideas that are critically evaluated. The following methods or techniques will help generate ideas. All of them can be undertaken individually, but many are better as group activities.
Downloadable Content
Making Connections Exercise (making-connections-workshop-jamie-steane.pdf)
Video prototyping
Video prototyping has become a powerful tool for designers to use throughout the development phase. Video is often used to produce low-fidelity prototypes for idea-sharing. It is beneficial to record the development and communicate when team members work in different offices and locations. Highly polished video prototypes that use animation and post-production effects to make ideas appear more realistic. They are widely used to promote ideas and receive buy-in from clients or potential investors, sometimes before any genuine design or development work has been done.
Video prototyping
This video prototype was created for a research project called Deep Discoveries for National Archives by the universities of Northumbria and Surrey (UK). It explains the interface development of a visual search engine that allows users to select details of images to refine image searches. It also uses heatmaps to show areas of similarity in search results.