UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · The Design Process
Common Ways Teams Skip the Process
Knowing the Double Diamond framework exists does not prevent teams from skipping it under real time pressure, and recognizing the specific, predictable ways this skipping happens helps a team catch itself before a shortcut becomes an expensive mistake.
A common shortcut jumps directly to Define or even Develop based purely on an internal assumption about what users need, skipping genuine discovery entirely; this is especially tempting for a founder who feels they already deeply understand their own market, but even a founder with genuine domain expertise can hold specific, unexamined assumptions about user behavior that only real discovery work would actually surface and correct.
Key Takeaways
- Skipping Discover based purely on internal assumption, even from a founder with genuine domain expertise, misses unexamined assumptions that real discovery work would surface.
- Converging on the very first idea or problem framing under time pressure defeats the purpose of divergent thinking, which requires genuinely considering multiple options.
- Treating the process as strictly linear misses that new information during a later phase can genuinely warrant revisiting an earlier one, which is normal, not a failure.
- Not every decision warrants the full process at full scale; right-sizing process rigor to a decision's actual stakes avoids both wasted effort and real risk.