In today's fast-paced and ever-changing world, organizations are constantly seeking innovative ways to solve problems and create value. One concept that has gained significant popularity in the field of design thinking is the Double Diamond model.This approach provides a structured framework for exploring problems, generating ideas, and delivering solutions. In this blog post, we will delve into the intricacies of the Double Diamond concept and explore how it can drive innovation within organizations.
Four phases
There are four phases in the Double Diamond model that each serve their purpose and help towards achieving the goal of solving user problems and needs. We do this by using a diverge and converge approach where we first try to gather as much ideas as possible and then discuss those ideas and come to a collective decision on which idea to continue.
Discover
In the discover phase, we start looking at the problem at hand. Without even considering any solutions, we do a deep-dive into identifying and understanding the issue. We do this by executing various steps like research and emphasising with users in order to gain enough insights to fully understand the issue to be able to define a problem in step 2 of the double diamond process.Steps that can help you achieve the necessary insights can be:
Desk research
Where you go through the available documents in order to get more familiar with the subject.User interviews: By talking to your users, you gather insights from experts which can help you understand the complete picture better.Surveys: By using a survey you can reach a lot of users fast and gain quantitative insights from your users.
Define
In this phase, we take all the information that we gathered during the Discover phase and converge it to a specific, well defined problem. We do this to ensure that we can keep focus and direction during the rest of the process.A useful method for this is to write a problem statement. By writing a problem statement you help team members and other stakeholders focus on the problem and explain them why it is important and who it impacts.A great resource to find more about problem statements can be found on this article of the NN group.
Develop
In the develop phase, we move to the second diamond and start searching for a solution to the defined problem in the define phase. We usually do this by executing workshops and brainstorming sessions together with our clients to come up with a large set of ideas.The book service design doing can help you find methods which you can use to prepare various exercises to do within these workshops.
A few notable exercises are:
How-might-we
Brainstorming
Brainwriting
Deliver
The deliver phase is the last phase of the double diamond. In this phase, we take our set of proposed solutions and converge on a single solution that will be used.The proposed solution can be worked out within an iterative process like scrum where we iterate in cycles to make small increments to the solution.By keeping an open feedback loop with users during the iteration cycles, we continuously feed new information and insights into our solution, delivering a solution that really matters and works for the user.