5 Design Decision Styles
Jared Spool and his crew have summarized the 5 design decision styles they've seen teams use:
- Unintended - focused on development and deployment
- Self - design for own use
- Genius - based on past design experiences
- Activity Focused - specific tasks
- User Focused - beyond activities into goals, needs, motivations
The order reflects the increasing amount of research the team employs to make decisions. While one could also think of the order as a growing maturity of the team, it turns out that each one has its place. Some projects don't warrant the costs, time, and resources necessary for extensive user research, but other projects will fail without it. Knowing when more extensive research is necessary is key to good experience design management.
Since the teams are working with different styles all the time, does it matter? Our research says it does. The teams that produced the best experiences knew these styles well and how to quickly switch between them. They knew when they needed to go whole hog and pull out all the stops for a User-Focused style project, while also knowing when it was important to bang out a quick design, knowing the results would essentially be unintended. Those teams had a rich toolbox of techniques and a solid understanding on how and when to use them.
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