Double diamond

Article — 3 July 2026 — 1,193 words

Restoring the elements of user experience

Business — Human-centred approaches — User experience

Some human-centred practitioners have been consigned to increasingly superficial considerations. Artificial intelligence presents an opportunity for us to bring the focus back to the fundamentals that make our work important and successful.

Article — 22 June 2026 — 1,837 words

Don’t make me thick

Information architecture — Society — User experience

We say “don’t make me think”, and “less is more”. But a naive application of these principles risks limiting our users when we should be helping them grow.

Article — 5 November 2024 — 2,559 words

Our flag in the sand — How to escape the desert of user needs by integrating agile and user experience

Business — User experience — User research

I have long been an advocate of agile ways of working. One of the things that originally drew me to user experience was the opportunity to have evidence-based ways of understanding the changes you need to make. So I was surprised whenever I encountered people who believed that user experience methods ran counter to the principles of agile.

Article — 10 August 2022 — 1,525 words

Nudge in human-centred approaches

Economics — Service design — User experience

Work: The University of Edinburgh

There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

Article — 21 October 2021 — 1,758 words

Design approaches aren’t sufficient to be human-centred

Social science — User experience

Many designers talk about user-centred design. But design approaches alone aren’t sufficient to ensure we are human-centred. Design approaches can be used carelessly — or even maliciously — to centre the designer and sideline the user.

Article — 14 June 2020 — 3,435 words

Service design and the Mario complex

Service design — User experience — User research

At Service Design in Government, I discovered that service designers see themselves as Mario. But that is an unrealistic model for what service design should be.

Linknote — 8 April 2020 — 28 words

Human-centred approaches — User experience — User research

The research funnel — Emma Boulton

A neat way of understanding what sorts of user research to do when, and how that maps to the double diamond.

This is elaborated on by Matthew Godfrey.

Linknote — 8 September 2019 — 178 words

Human-centred approaches

The double diamond, 15 years on… — Cat Drew — Design Council

It’s 15 years since the Design Council came up with the double diamond, a model of the design process.

I find it useful as a general guide, although it does seem to confuse many people who assume it to be a strictly linear process. Recent conversations I’ve had at both the Service Design Academy and work have shown me that it remains a challenge to truly convey the complexity of a design process, and that the double diamond may in fact hinder this.

As always, it’s about having the right approach and mindset, rather than expecting an off-the-shelf tool or model to fix all your problems. Cat Drew’s article points this out:

But following a toolkit does not equal designing a good solution to the right problem. It is as much about the mindsets as the tools (e.g. being humble and open to ideas coming from everywhere and changing as a result of feedback, curious about what’s really going on and how things are working or not and working as teams rather than as a lone genius).

Linknote — 17 April 2019 — 71 words

Human-centred approaches

How do we design for divergence and diversity if convergence is the goal? — Alastair Somerville

Is convergence in design thinking problematic?

The problem I have with it is it models a form of Normality. You can diverge but, in the end, you must converge.

An interesting idea from Alastair Somerville. He explains his alternative design process:

Yes, there is a convergence to design a product that meets identified user needs. Yes, there are constraints around what can be made.

However, divergence is recognised through the process.