Our Process

Great design starts with a solid process. We use a tested and proven process for driving meaningful innovation and design. In the end, this process is designed to generate remarkable user experiences. And it works.

Understand

Understanding the problem you’re solving is key. We spend time immersing ourselves in your business and industry to establish a complete picture of your current situation, and use that information to help frame the problem space. Ultimately, we use this information to help us get to a question: “How might we make flying more social?”, “How might we make the retail dressing room experience more interesting?” These questions are the cornerstone of market differentiation, and the jumping off point for innovation.

Discover

Part anthropology, the Discover part of our process is designed to help uncover real customer insight that can serve to guide ideation and product/service direction. We don’t like focus groups much – instead, we go out into the field, watching your customers in their real lives, gaining insight into where new opportunities may lie. Instead of dreaming up ideas in a vacuum, we use actual people to help drive the product and service innovation process.

Create

Armed with business, market and customer insight, our next move is to dive into the creation process. This “guided inspiration” is facilitated through structured brainstorming and exploration of solutions, and is intended to create a large volume of ideas in a short amount of time. We work with you to dream about the future, imagine wild new products and services, and discover hidden opportunities. Choosing an idea becomes the hardest part.

Refine

If the Create phase is designed to generate a wealth of possibility, the Refine phase is designed to winnow those possibilities down into real products. This is where the bulk of our work lies, and represents the most critical part of the process. We start by looking at the field of ideas, evaluating them and applying constraints to bubble up the most compelling of the bunch.

Then comes the prototyping. We work to prototype up possible product and service ideas, and begin quickly testing them with real customers to gain insight into the effectiveness of them. Iteratively working through layers of detail, we move from fuzzy concepts to real design, constantly validated by customers to assure a market fit. By the time we reach the end of this phase, we’ve developed a full specification that outlines all the design details needed to implement the product or service.

Develop

Because we believe in sticking to our strengths, we let those good at building things, build things. During the Refine phase, we’ll work to help identify implementation partners that will be tasked with carrying out our instructions, and work as a consultant to them, helping answer questions and provide direction during implementation. We believe our biggest strength is in design, and we stick to that.