Design Territories

The spaces and paradigms of design

Updated: May 2022.

I’m often asked to explain what design is and how it works. I’ve observed that organizations often underutilize design and the expertise they can provide. Instead, these types of organizations view design as a function of their deliverables. The majority of my career has been working in a role to ensure design efforts extend beyond the interface and into the experiences of users and how organizations manage their products and services.

Before discussing standard design processes like Lean UX vs. Design Thinking, let’s zoom out and explore what design is applied to, design paradigms, and the design context.

What are we designing?

Artifacts

Artifacts are the tangible things we design. e.g., A poster, a digital interface, a point of sales system, or even napkins, silverware, or menu.

Experiences

Artifacts are perceived and/or used by customers. This interaction lives within an experience the user is having. Some experiences are designed, but most experiences are out of our control. As designers, we must understand the user’s context to make sure the artifacts we design will improve (or at least not degrade) a user’s experience.

Services

Services express value through multiple touchpoints, artifacts, and multiple sub-experiences. Service design focuses on designing how organizations can provide value and support experiences. Often this means we must design artifacts for people that work for the organization in addition to users.

Design Lenses

Defining focus allows us to choose the right team, process, milestones, and timeline. Design thinking and deliverables can focus on many different categories: service, experience, interface, interactions, graphics, data visualizations, branding, marketing, advertising, etc. I often use the following lenses to help define what we mean by “design.”

Strategic Focus

Strategy can refer to all kinds of activities and deliverables. In terms of experience strategy, this lens focuses on how a product, system, experience, or service works. A strategic focus looks to define the value and purpose of the experience. This focus requires a deep understanding of the users and the organization. Experience strategy’s four pillars[1] are business strategy, value innovation, user insights and research, and a desirable user experience. Exploring and validating viability and value are key to this type of design.

Tactical Focus

Tactical design can both be UX design and/or UI design. A tactical design approach focuses on how an artifact, product, or system is presented, how it feels, and its usability—exploring and validating how the designed artifact communicates to the users and how they understand the artifact and interact with it. Traditionally this was called communication design, but interactions are essential to comprehension. Interaction design and interactive design all mean different things and can be applied to different types of design lenses. To reduce confusion between a design discipline and an area of focus, I’m choosing to use the phrase tactical design over the design discipline. This is why the argument around defining UX vs. UI is a bit outdated, but I’m not here to write that story. Are they different? Yep, but how they are applied has the most significant impact.

Perceptual Focus

Perceptual design focuses on influencing a user’s perception based on the presentation and communication of an artifact, product, system, experience, or service. While this perceptual design can overlap with tactical design, perceptual design align more with marketing and branding and less with modern product management.

Design Paradigms

There are many flavors of design, but these three paradigms[2] succinctly capture the most breadth.

1. Engineering Paradigm
2. Human Information Processing (HIP) Paradigm
3. Design Thinking Paradigm

Engineering Paradigm

• Oriented towards increasing features and functionality of a system
• Studying users is recommended to collect requirements and create efficiencies
• In this model, requirements are created by stakeholders and subject matter experts
• Project management focuses on available resources
• Focuses on user productivity and reducing errors generally through evaluation

Human Information Processing (HIP) Paradigm

• Oriented towards rethinking the model and/or flow of a system
• Studying users to understand their mental models and workflow is key to finding insights for system improvements
• Requirements are based on user insights, technology advancements, and business objectives.
• Focuses on increasing learnability, productivity, the value perceived in the system, and using design as a differentiator

Design Thinking Paradigm

• Oriented towards innovation and holistically redesigning experiences, less of a focus on systems.
• Studying the user context, modeling the environment and artifacts within a user experience, and developing an empathic understanding of different groups of users is key to innovation.
• Experience principles are driven by user research, stakeholder input, and the competitive landscape. In more modern ways of working, stakeholder input comes from cross-collaborative participatory workshops, not just interviews.
• Design thinking focus on desirability, innovation, and a deep understanding of human behavior. Advanced design thinking seeks to influence the phenomenological components of an experience.

Strategic Factors

ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE METHOD SUITABILITY

Context of Design

Here are some core examples. This list is not meant to be exhaustive. In order to align with the “What are we designing” terms above, I’ll be using the word artifact more than I usually would. Artifact is just a more agnostic way of referring to anything tangible people use to complete a task; post-it notes or a todo app.

Work
The artifact and experience are in a work context. Often the end-user doesn’t have a choice in selecting the tools they are given at work. Example: Customer service representatives who use Salesforce Service Cloud.

Productivity
An artifact used to get work done. This may overlap with a work context, but the user may have some control over how and if they utilize the artifact. For example, a customer service agent might use Salesforce’s knowledge database to store information they have documented, or they may write down the information on a note and leave it on their desk. Example two: A designer may use Sketch or Adobe Illustrator as their primary design tool.

Consumer
An artifact to exchange value with an organization for personal purposes. Example: A user may want to get a pizza delivered. This user could do the following:

• Call their favorite pizza restaurant
• Order online directly from a particular pizza restaurant
• Use GrubHub to order a pizza
• Use DoorDash to order a pizza

Informational/Communicative
An artifact that communicates information but doesn’t provide much functionality. Example: A user is researching which camera to buy, so they seek out sites such as dpreview.com, PetaPixel.com, theverge.com, etc.

Behavioral
An artifact that is trying to change behavior. Example: Applications that help people learn to save money, fitness apps, or e-commerce trying to get users to have different shopping patterns.

Combination of Contexts
Some projects combine a few or most of these. Especially projects focused on significant changes to the system(s) or an experience.

Design Perspectives

FILTERS FOR DESIGN REPRESENTATIONS

Within each context, you can modify your research methods and present your synthesis in the following way:

Ecological
Ecological representations focus on user needs, environment, culture, relationships, journeys, and touchpoints.

Interaction
Interaction representations focus on cognition, workflow, technology, and value.

Emotional
Emotion representations focus on user needs, emotional journeys, workflows, and perceptions.

Technical
Technical representations focus on inputs/outputs, systems, data, and workflow.

Growth Goals

How a project or initiative impacts an organization can be easily represented by a growth matrix. The two questions are:

1. Does the organization want to provide a new offering?
2. Are you targeting new users or existing users?

Growth Matrix

The type of growth an organization seeks can change the methodology. Design Thinking paradigms are often applied to the Adapt and Create quadrants. HIP paradigms can be applied to all but will be the primary paradigm for Extend. The Engineering paradigm works well for Manage but is often used on Extend.

FOOTNOTES

1. Levy, J. (2015). UX strategy: how to devise innovative digital products that people want. (1st ed.). O’Reilly.
2. Hartson, R and Pyla, P (2012). The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience. (1st ed.) Elsevier Science.