The double diamond ideation product design process starts as literally a drawing of two diamonds sort of placed next to each other. It’s a process diagram that explains the ideation methodology. It’s also known in product development as the design method.

Double Diamond Basics

We start with divergent thinking in the first diamond. We broaden ideas related to discovering insight into a problem and defining a focus area from one outside tip of the diamond to the other. In the second diamond, we develop and deliver potential solutions.

You’re not trying to think about the exact thing that you want to design but everything around it. No idea is a bad idea when you’re using this process. Your goal is to have ideas converge by taking all of the ones that you’ve written down and narrowing the list by placing them into groups of ideas that make sense together by category or theme.

The design process is really, really cool because you go through this a couple of times so that the ideas in the double diamond diagram are diverging, converging, diverging, and converging again. This process works because you’re really thinking out of the box. The diagram also promotes good discipline so that you can narrow down and focus on the things that you’re supposed to focus on.

Product Design Education

You can learn about the double diamond process and other ideation workshop tools with a formal online product design education. Formal training covers this and many other important product design and development processes that you need for a successful career.

Learn how live shopping and community building can provide you with the information and context needed to enhance your ecommerce shopping experience.

With live shopping, something that is incredibly valuable is understanding your communities on a deeper level. Communities are changing every hour, every minute, and every day.
I think one of the most beautiful things about live shopping events is that you’ll be able to understand what your audience is thinking, what they’re asking from you, and what they’re doing in real-time. In a way, that feels holistic and allows you to put context to the situation.

For example, we had one women’s health brand that used our solution a few months ago. We wanted to understand a little bit more about this customer. People think that live shopping events and live shopping are only for digital-first brands that are innovative and easy to sell. Such as a makeup or skincare company. However, what we’re noticing is that if you can build a community and engage, live shopping is for you.

This brand made use of a lot of our engagement modules. They asked a lot of questions and triggered a lot of polls within the live shopping experience. One of the great takeaways was they found out that 54% of their audience was first-time moms.

Now that not only is insightful information to target the rest of your live shopping event but is helpful for future events and to figure out what kind of products you want to launch later on.

Data is something that I think we’re all a little bit wary of. However, insights, context and information from your community, especially in real-time, really are priceless.

With product design, we start by trying to understand user needs and behaviors. Once we have this important information, we then move on to the ideation stage of product development.

The ideation process usually takes place in a workshop. We gather a bunch of people in a very specific room or other type of physical space for a condensed period of time to brainstorm problem solutions and other ideas. It’s critical to select a very good mix of people for a great ideation session. We never concentrate exclusively on designers or technology-focused people. Instead, we select a cross-functional team of people who can think about the product topic from all types of different angles.

An ideation workshop team is normally composed of people who pursued a formal product design education, received hands-on training and possess extensive professional experience. If you don’t think you can afford to spend the time or money pursuing a degree in this field, you should consider an online product design education.

“A product design project begins a number of different ways,” says Alicia Tam Wei. “Sometimes it’s about something that annoys you. Sometimes it’s about something that’s a big dream of yours. Sometimes it’s about something that you wish existed. It’s often kind of like the ultimate wish fulfillment.”

Stephanie Mantis states, “I think it’s important to figure out why you’re doing something. So for me, oftentimes, my product development starts with a need, be it functional and physical, or emotional and more personal.” “First,” she continues, “identifying what am I trying to do and why, is an amazing place to start. If it’s your problem, it’s probably somebody else’s problem. And if your solution works for you, it probably works for somebody else.”

Mantis further explains, “When I graduated college, I kind of looked around my apartment, and I was like, ‘Oh, you’re a college graduate like maybe it’s time to upgrade some of your choices and fixtures.’ One of those things were my necklace racks, which at the time were literally thumbtacks in the wall. You know, there’s five or six of them. I said, ‘You can do better than this.’ I happened to have a collection of small plastic animals on my bookshelf. I looked at them, and I said, ‘Sorry guys, but I’m going to cut your heads off and mount them to a piece of wood.’ That kind of touch upon what was happening at the time with an animal trophy trend. And that’s how my first product post-graduation was born. And that is the pack rack.”

Online product design education reiterates the importance of producing an organic and believable product. “It became this sort of organic situation where I’ve had this problem and decided to make my own solution. Over the course of time, I refined that solution so that it would be producible, and scalable, and sellable,” Stephanie Mantis concludes.

There are a lot of different techniques to use when looking at product development. The various techniques go beyond product design and development. We call the type of research that we do “generative research.” We call it “generative” because it’s not necessarily about quantified research. In quantified research, we can have access that can inspire thoughts and ideas. For this reason, it is necessary to make such techniques part of product design education. It means including it in online product design education too.

We’re interested in inspirations that allow us to look at problems differently. In this case, we are trying to surround ourselves within project spaces. Frequently, and for the longest time, it’s been boards on a wall. More recently, that’s turning into more virtual project spaces, where it’s possible to modify things much more.

Most importantly, we’re trying to immerse ourselves and surround ourselves with inspirations. We immerse ourselves in these inspirations that allow us to look at a problem holistically and get at specific insights. Sometimes, that comes from detailed ethnographic research, where we spend time with people in their homes so that we can understand the tasks that they’re doing. Also, we may be looking at the whole context around using a specific kind of device or technology.

Many times, we are also pulling inspiration from similar products and trends. Again, we are looking at the culture of how people live. Often, we’re designing for different cultures, sometimes in other countries.

At the same time, there’s culture and subculture. You can define it in very narrow slices as you’re looking at who you’re trying to connect to within a brand. In this case, we’re trying to create a very holistic picture as much as possible through imagery. It is often on the wall through notes and quotations from people who we might speak to within a culture or subculture. As we do this, we are looking specifically at some technologies. You can use these technologies in parallel with what we’re designing toward.

We work to get those things together into territories. Then, we might look to design within and try to create personas around the person who we’re designing toward. We want to connect those personas to real things that we see in real life with real people as much as possible.

We try hard not to fall back on our predisposed way of thinking about the person’s identity. We want to get outside of ourselves. We want to have empathy toward the life of the person who we’re designing toward. In this effort, you dive in and look for solutions that can help the identified persons.

The mark of success in your online UX design education is having the ability to translate insights into designing equitable, inclusive products. It is especially important for everyone on your UI design team to be on board and in the room throughout the entire design process. This way, everyone will understand why the insights you are focusing on are important.

For visual and UX design, you should try to have a mindset of intersectional identity. What does this mean for your product? For example, let’s say you are designing a mental health product for communities of color to be matched with therapists of color. What imagery do you think about? What language would be important?

What features would such an app need to have? Let’s say some users might not speak English as a first language. These people should be able to select an option in a form that would match them with a therapist speaking their first language and thus better speaking to their needs. It is important for each feature in your UI to be implemented into wireframing, mockups, and the visual design process.

UX professionals also need to be thinking about how different people would react to the products they engage with. This is the reason why intersectionality is so important.

Continuing with our example, you are trying to make a product tailored for people of color. You have the imagery down and feel like the result is inclusive; perhaps pictures of people of color are included in the marketing materials.

However, you may test the app on a user over 60, who might not see themselves using the product. Simply saying “let me get a bunch of people of color in the materials” may exclude age, gender, or other important components of intersectional identity. To ensure that everyone truly feels seen, it is important to have each component in your mind as you design.

A particular type of research that UX design professionals typically do is called generative research. In this type of research, designers will often engage their end users to come up with UI ideas or solutions.

One thing you can do to practice generative research is to have each person you interview come up with their “perfect solution.” Draw it out with them. Ask them where the search bar should go or what the buttons on the screens should do.

Do not feel limited to what is actually possible. Have your testers dream big and imagine big. Ask them what they want to get to, what they would like to see, and what they would like to actually do. “The point of this is not necessarily to go out and design exactly that, but to understand, what the motivators are behind that, and to spark some ideas within yourself,” says UX design educator Daniel Holtzman.

The idea behind generative research is to co-create. Instead of thinking about what users need or listening to what they think they need, it is to sit down with them and ask them their biggest challenges. If you had a magic wand and could do anything, how would you solve their challenges? Ask them to draw this solution for you or build it from very simple prototyping materials.

Any UX workshop that you do with your users which involves the co-creation of a solution will be 100% more powerful. This is because your users have all the answers. “They know. They are there every day with their challenges in the settings that they are, in the cultures that they are,” states UI design professional Rinat Sherzer. Asking your users to help you design a solution will bring out ideas that you could never have thought of.

One of the most significant lessons that you should take away from your online UX design education is not to solve for someone, but to solve with them. Listen to the stories, then let them imagine a solution. Let them draw, act out, or prototype the solution. Through these responses, many new challenges will arise, and you will always get their perspective. You can then go and refine, iterate, and work with their prototypes. Getting users’ points of view and co-creating with them is priceless.

Prototyping is an essential part of our job, and it is not always what we all think about. Prototyping doesn’t necessarily require a machine or a 3D printer. I always tell my team that the first rapid prototyping machine they must use in their project is a printer. It is effective because you start designing on the screen, which can be very challenging. It’s a challenge because as soon as you get into CAD, you sometimes keep the notion of proportion, but you lose the notion of scale.

For example, I have had designers repeatedly create 3D printing. The day they take it out of the machine, they look at it and say, oh, my god, this is big! It is for such reasons that a simple print is actually a great way to prototype your project rapidly. As you get into your process and refine it, maybe you will decide to cut and form the shape. Based on the print you have done, maybe you get to a point where you’re going to 3D print. It means in particular situations, 3D printing can still be a necessity.

Usually, in 3D printing, you might prefer to keep it maybe not to the last stage but the later stage of the product development process. There is a good reason behind this claim. It’s when you have already refined your design quite a lot, and you’re nitpicking the proportion and specific detail. In this case, you really want to make sure that your surface transition is proper and so forth. These are some of the fundamentals everyone in product design education must learn. Also, it must include online product design education.

When I speak about 3D printing, that’s 3D printing in plastic. We also do 3D printing in metal, which is slightly different. It is different because we don’t need metal to evaluate or shape an interface. When we use 3D printing in metal, we use what we call DMLS. It is usually to print a production part, which makes it very expensive. In such cases, it becomes rare.

We have one line of products in which their production is of that approach, but they may all cost you almost as much as it costs. It’s a little bit specific and for a particular market, and it’s also interesting. Once you are comfortable with all the plastic 3D printing technologies that are available, making that last leap to print in production is not that difficult. It’s just one more step.

Let’s think about UX design in the 1940s with Toyota and the Japanese automobile industry. This was a revolutionary milestone in the history of UX because it was the first time that the human input was taken into account throughout the entire development of these autos. Toyota designed his factories around the principle of optimizing the working environment by adding human input. In online UX design education today, we’d call that usability testing.

He was so conscious of the value of the human input that he would even allow the employers to suddenly stop the supply chain if they had some feedback about something to improve the workflow. Again, it was usability testing at its finest.

Moving on to the 1950s, we come to Henry Dreyfuss. He’s basically famous for his statement “Designing for people.” Dreyfuss was an American industrial designer who designed iconic products. Even though they’re iconic, you might not know about them or why they’re relevant to our history and today’s lifestyle. Examples include the Hoover vacuum cleaner, the tabletop telephone and the Royal Typewriter, including the deluxe model for companies.

For him, the focus of UI design was the point of contact between the product and the human being who was interacting with it. If there was some sort of friction in this interaction, then the design was completely bad and unsuccessful. However, if the point of contact — the interaction between the user and the product — was memorable, easy or happy, then that was a success. It was a particularly successful UI experience and design if it prompted the user to buy more.

Continuing into the 1960s, Walt Disney was a key figure. Disney is considered one of the very first UX designers without even owning that title. He was a visionary who envisioned a world in which the latest technology could improve human lives. He was obsessed with creating magical, immersive, authentic and seamless experiences. That was how Disney World started.

When I do a project, I consider the composition of my team. We have to understand the socioeconomic components of the market. The components within these technological areas where they’re created, researched, produced, mass-produced, and consumed are how we can understand the contributing factors of the markets we’re designing for.

Looking at the statistics between 2018 and 2019, you can see there is demand for all engineers. However, the need for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) engineers has grown by 1,400% compared to all other engineers. So that’s 14 times the amount of all other engineering capabilities. There’s a lack of UX design engineers to help make programs and systems for everyone. Online UX design education can give you the tools to understand your users’ wants and needs effectively.

And if you look at some other statistics, I think it’s fair to say that probably less than 10% of our engineers–software engineers–know what AR is and how to program and code within that environment. It’s more troubling to me that, unfortunately, the engineers who have the needed access to these technologies to learn about them are of economic privilege. This economic privilege only allows them to know this information within their economic boundaries and learn how to code within that. Ultimately, these boundaries prevent them from learning about other economic classes of society and how these technologies might benefit them as well.

This highly tech-centered environment doesn’t help our current generation of storytellers. These people are our educators, teachers, journalists, communication students, and filmmakers, and they don’t have the power to bring these new knowledge sets to their students, the next generation of artists. Essentially, UX and UI skills are highly in-demand technologies, but few people are training for them. Only those from a particular kind of environment are being trained in this field. That is from a creation standpoint.

In terms of usership, there are also incredible amounts of disparities. For example, if the next iPhone allowed you to obtain the kind of AR and VR information you need, but the glasses needed come at an enormous cost, who would be able to access it? Most people would not be able to because they cannot afford the astronomical price. HoloLens is one of the best AR glasses available currently on the market. If the cost for a pair of HoloLens glasses were $5,000, no schools could access them since their funding is limited.

These are the major conversations that we have when designing new UX and UI products. Who has access to the latest technology? Who do we want to create it for? And who is making it already? We strive to provide an answer to all of these critical questions. Essentially, we need to train more UX design and UI design individuals to supply the demand for these technologies. Online UX design education can teach you how to provide this technology to more people worldwide.