Develop the Right UX the First Time with User Modeling & Double Diamond Thinking

You’ve been going back and forward in your inbox for hours now, trying to get clarification from a sponsor who doesn’t know what he wants.

Every question you ask, he spits out a reply more useless than the last.

Where do you go from here?

Do you continue to dig through this email chain, trying to dissect the corporate speak and guess at requirements? You’ve already got a bad feeling about this project. How do they expect you to turn this vague idea into a functioning app, and how long are you going to spend revising it until they finally pay you for your time-consuming clairvoyance?

This is the biggest money and productivity hole in software development.

Poorly defined applications have led to a persistent miscommunication between business and IT. This contributes to a 66% project failure rate for these applications, costing U.S. businesses at least $30 billion every year — Forrester Research

You’re trying to have a technical conversation with a non-technical person — stop trying.

You can’t push the sponsor to give you answers to questions they don’t understand

You’ve the burden of knowledge, and you’ve forgotten what it’s like to know nothing about the product development process.

What you really need is a common ground. The sponsor just wants to see that you’ve understood their requirements. They want to see the light at the end of the tunnel before they throw money at you.

That’s why Primary does. It’s a way to communicate and plan that can unify the technical with the a sponsor’s business goals.

It’s a single document that can orientate sponsors, developers and designers at a glance.

Primary is the lingua franca of product development

To explain why Primary works the way it does. Let’s talk about Journey and User Flows in relation to the double diamond model:

The double-diamond is a shared framework for creative thinking and a visual map for problem-solving. It is a systemized way of exploring good ideas and executing the best ones. — Hallam

If you’ve never head of the double diamond or would like to know more about it then click here:

The double diamond is a popular design framework so if you have heard of it carry on.

Journeys are for First Diamond Problems and Flows Detail Second Diamond Solutions

All the things that make the Double Diamond an incredible framework for projects and solving problems in general, happen naturally with Primary.

Journeys describe how people interact with your business, service, app or product.

Journeys are high-level descriptions of what the user wants to get done. Each step in a journey is called a stage. All kinds of information can be added to a stage.

The journey describes the major interactions that a user has with with you on the way to complete their goal, or solve their problem.

Their motivations are compatible with the first diamond. Remember, the first diamond is all about determining the problems you want your app to solve. It’s about building the right thing.

As long as you have a diverging and converging decision process, where you go wide in your approach, before you cut the app model down to the problems you really need to solve…then just by using Primary you’re automatically following the double diamond to the tee.

This is no accident. The double diamond model is compatible with a user’s story arch.

A narrative has a first diamond conflict and second diamond resolution.

Primary forces you to think about UX as a story, which helps to move work forward and not just around.

User flows resolve the story and show the path through the second diamond

Each flow should deliver one useful user goal.

• sign in
• add to cart
• log out
• create a new x
• update an x

Use strong verbs to ensure you’re keeping your model achievement orientated.

Flows are composed of a series of steps. Each step is initiated by a user, and then the app responds with interface.

In-line with the principles of agile development, Primary flows were designed to be completed in short bursts.

A flow can have multiple branches to show deviations in your application model away from the hero user. A branch is always an alternative path towards the same goal.

For example, a branch could be indicative of a user requesting more information, or signing up with a Google account instead of filling out a form.

Primary is so low-friction that you and your sponsors can work together to tell the user’s story

This is how Primary gets you out of your inbox and on the same page as the sponsor.

In-person, or over a Zoom call, you can use Primary to quickly describe the flow of an app.

You can ask your sponsor questions in context to get usable insight, relevant feedback and actionable instruction.

You’ll find that corporate speak fades away once you break down a technical project into its visual steps, effectively removing the barriers that are preventing IT and business communication.

You can describe what will happen in every stage.

An assemble your flows into presentations to show off real UI.

Show the sponsor a path through the diamonds and get their requirements down to a science

Sponsors hate opaque software development.

Used correctly, Primary can land you more gigs and get the greenlight sooner.

Because it’s an effective tool for convincing sponsors you understand the direction the app needs to go in and what it needs to do.

Unless you give reason every sponsor has doubts that you’ve really understood their requirements. They are thinking, “this is a lot of money, will it get my business the results I’m looking for?”

Using Primary, you can map out a path through the first diamond and the second.

Often all the sponsor is looking for is to quickly see that you’ve understood — okay, that’s an interaction — that goes at the Persona Journey level. That’s a detail- we need to build UI for that because it’s User Flow.

Once the sponsor gives you the OK your designers take over the Primary document

For UX/UI designers, a Primary model is the ultimate guide, it’s a step through, of every interaction a user is likely to have in context.

All that’s left to do is fill in the blanks with real UI.

Primary has integrations to Figma and Sketch, and you can copy / paste any image into a Primary document.

It’s a truly low friction work environment for designers to iterate faster with less noise and better signal and consider more solutions by rapidly modelling the user’s experience.

The developer gets a hold of Primary

Finally the developer picks up Primary are realises that it speaks to him on a spiritual level.

He’s never seen requirements laid out this clearly before, so he switches Primary to dark mode, pushes his earphones in deep, sucks down a Red Bull and gets to coding.

What This All Means

Primary can help you complete projects in less time. It can reassure sponsors and stakeholders that you’ve understood their requirements and get you the green light faster and then when it’s time to make the thing, you have a very clear guide to follow.

Primary is more functional than the darling UI prototype, easier to modify than a fixed wireframe and more fun than complete documentation.

We consciously created a tool that did what we needed it to, helped us manage projects and build apps. And since we use the double diamond framework every day — iterating through convergent and divergent thought to define problems and then solve them, the Persona Journey / User Flow structure came about naturally.

And it’s incredible

Want to see just how incredible? Try Primary for yourself. There’s practically no learning curve. A word of warning, it will break you.

After only 30 minutes, you’ll never be able to go back to how you used to do things.