When a team struggles to design a product or service that resonates with users, the diagnosis often focuses on which parts of the design process might be the source the problem. We should have done more research, or we need to determine user goals, or the UI is unclear, or the visual design turns people off.
These conclusions are often correct, yet miss the problem. The problem isn't part of the design process, but the process as a whole.
I think of the design process as a two cycle engine.
Image by A. Schierwagen, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0
A two-cycle engine is a relatively simple internal combustion engine with a high power-to-weight ratio. It works like this:
Air and fuel is drawn into the combustion chamber during the intake
The piston squeezes the fuel/air mix during compression
The spark detonates the fuel/air mix, pushing the piston back during ignition
The movement of the piston both expels the exhaust and draws new fuel and air into the chamber, restarting the cycle.
If your engine isn't working, it could be for a lot of reasons. There might be something stopping fuel or air from reaching the chamber. Or maybe the spark isn't igniting it during the compression. Or the exhaust is blocked. Or any other part could be malfunctioning, and therefore the engine won't run and it won't power your weedeater or motorcycle or AWZ P70 Zwickau.
If you discover some part of the engine is malfunctioning, you're right to fix it. But fixing the malfunctioning part doesn't guarantee a smoothly running engine. And if you fix & improve that one thing over and over, you might still lack engine power if some other part you missed is also malfunctioning.
So it is with design.
Intake is feedback and other data that informs the design work
Compression is the creation of design work
Ignition is testing the work with users
Exhaust is discarding work that's proven ineffective
In the same way that “writing is rewriting”, design is redesign, and it requires this cycle to function. Too often we focus on just the compression — how good are we at creating design work — when the problem is often the quality of the feedback, whether we're honestly testing the work, or the ability to discard things that aren't working.
A team struggles when one or more of these component parts is malfunctioning or unbalanced relative to the others. If this cycle isn't running smoothly, it could be a failure of any part of the cycle, so to properly diagnose it, you need to look at every part of the machine.