Does the Double Diamond make sense for AI-enabled teams?by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, For twenty years, the Double Diamond has been our north star. Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. It's elegant. It's teachable. It's in every junior's UX case study. And it made sense…when it was created. All that upfront research made economic sense when coding was the most expensive part of the process. Better to get it right before handoff because it's expensive for engineering to make changes later. But that was before AI. Before AI, making things was expensive. Every prototype required designers, developers, and hours of work. So we front-loaded everything but the making. We did interviews, we formed insights, we made problem statements, we got stakeholder input, and we checked feasibility with dev. Now, AI tools enable the making to be 10x cheaper and faster. If you can make three coded prototypes in 3 hours, rather than 3 days, do we still use the same process to design? I did a little cost comparison that challenges everything we thought we knew about the Double Diamond.
Until next week! ✌️ |
The Fountain Institute is an independent online school that teaches advanced UX & product skills.
How the Fountain Institute Started and Where It's Going by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, In case you missed it, Hannah dropped a pretty big announcement in the last newsletter. I wanted to tell the story of how the Fountain Institute started, why we’ve never had an “About Us” page, and where I think we’re headed next. How it started The Fountain Institute started when two friends decided to grab a beer and work...then kept doing it for 7 years. There were many false starts along the way. Starting...
A goodbye and the story that goes with it By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, There's an idea I've been chasing for most of my working life, and I didn't know it. I want to tell you about it, and about something that happened a few years ago that I haven't talked about much publicly, but that belongs in this story. Some of you might already know this about me, but I used to work in education departments at museums. The thing that grabbed me in the museums was a shift that happened, away from the...
7 Ways Hiring is Evolving for Senior Designers by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, 2026 has been a wild ride for product designers, so we thought it might be worth checking in to see what's changing about design hiring. There has never been a better time to think outside the box with your career strategies. In this article, we give you a playbook from various experts where every piece of advice is from this year. Get comfortable with live problem-solving. Shipped, traceable work beats case studies....