The Design Phase

The start of the design phase is a great place to take stock of what you know about the audience. By now, you should have a good idea of what will and work for them and maybe some ideas for solutions.

Design requires a mindset shift from when you were in Discovery, so it's a good idea to get together with your team and reflect on the findings of your discovery report and see if you agree on what it's telling you.

Mapping out the concerns, pain points, and solutions is a useful activity that takes you fully from Discovery into Design. You can find our method for this here.

In this exercise, you'll take what your audience cares about and then map this out against potential solutions that you've seen in the real world. It's a good way to get the ideas flowing and allows you to be clear in your intent.

During your design workshop, you'll want to involve some of the people you spoke to in discovery. It's an opportunity to test your thinking with the audience and co-create some key elements together.

No two discovery workshops are the same, so you may be creating cardboard prototypes, scribbling post-it notes with wild abandon, or acting to camera.

You can find some advice on running your design workshop here.

Where the discovery workshop is for creating and prototyping, you'll eventually need to settle on a series of ideas or solutions that you'll commit to building for your audience.

This is where reality bites, and you'll need to articulate what you'll develop, how long it'll take, and how your audience will experience it in order to solve the problem with clear measures.

Your high-level design can be a simple deck, a video, a series of installations or anything you can dream up, but you should aim to create something shareable that exhibits your concepts in a clear and concise way.

Stakeholders will want to see how the project is shaping up, so be sure to involve them during the design workshop or, at a minimum, in your regular catch-ups. The concepts you show them should surprise and delight, but not be so surprising that they can't see the link between the problem statement and the design itself.

We often run design showcases where we take stakeholders through the high-level design, any mock-ups or prototypes, and indicative timelines. This generates a bit of excitement for the next phase, and if you've done the phase correctly, should your stakeholders will become solid advocates.
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