Design operations guide

Single-part design concepts

Test a concept that’s a single, simple, standalone part.  This analysis should be a straightforward, scoped-down design concept.

This design concept could be something like rewording a single letter or rescripting a specific phone call. To create three different versions of this single-part design expression, create three versions of the re-wording or three versions of the re-scripting to test with participants.

Multi-part design concepts

Most designs are more complicated than they appear. Even if you can use just a few words to describe your concept, that concept is usually made up of many different parts. Think about analyzing and expressing a design concept that is made up of multiple, interlocking, and interdependent parts.

Test a concept that has multiple, interlocking, interdependent parts. For each part, make and test three expressions. 

In the case of a website, components that need to be designed include, but are not limited to, text, images, pages, and interaction points like buttons. There are also dependencies that you must design, such as website hosting, legal and technical compliance, visual and functional links with the systems around them, and regular maintenance. In this way, building a website requires the build of both a product that has many components, and a system that supports or connects to that product.

In the case of an in-person greeting program for people visiting government buildings, the system has multiple parts. The team would need to design for the greeters, including designing to understand:

• Where they are in a labor pool
• Who their management would be
• What scripts will they use for the first greeting
• What happens when they need to go on break
• What happens if they can’t answer someone’s question
• Where their pay comes from
• If they’re volunteers, how you will attract people to and refresh the volunteer pool.

After breaking down the service of a greeter system into its component parts, the team will then need to create different expressions of these parts, test them, then test them together. As you can tell, multiple rounds of testing would be required to ensure that this service works well.

Design expression framework

Your goal is to find the best answer for the participants. The arbiter of what is needed is the participant, so proposing each expression to show the participants what could be is paramount. If you only choose and test one expression, you might as well tell the participants that you understand their experience better than they do. And of course, as you know from the HCD discovery phase, you know that you don’t know.