The Truly XD design process

Nasty gaps that trip up even the best teams

Digital projects don't necessarily fail because of bad ideas, concepts or designs. Various gaps can be to blame, too. Two examples:

• Execution gap: the gap between a compelling concept and what the team can actually implement, maintain and develop further day to day.
• Vision gap: the gap between the ideas that people within a team have of supposedly the same thing. Usually these are ideas that were never discussed – after all, 'we're all talking about the same thing'.

Whatever these gaps are called, they usually lead to similar outcomes: projects that have to launch half-finished because nothing else is feasible right now, or ambitious (and usually expensive) concepts gathering dust in a drawer because the team lacks the capacity to implement them. 🎺 Sad trombone.

The Truly XD design process makes these gaps visible and makes sure they get closed. It deliberately distinguishes between two things: the foundation, and what can grow on top of it.

The solution: maturity-minded experience design and strategy

The Truly XD process is an inclusive design process matched to your team's UX maturity – maturity-minded, in short. That means: we start where your team is today, not where it theoretically ought to be. In concrete terms, once we know your project goals, we first take a look at the foundation they're meant to be achieved on (using the UX Maturity Snapshot, among other things). Only then do we move on to everything else.

The foundation: assess, build and expand

For a process or product to improve sustainably and reach ambitious goals, two things need to be in place:

• Your team grows with the goals. Throughout our design process, we sharpen your team's eye for user-centred design, so that user-centred results don't depend solely on us but stay and grow with you – as in-house knowledge.
• Friction disappears. Within our design process, decisions are increasingly based on real user and stakeholder needs rather than gut feeling. An accessible design system and clear process templates replace constant reinvention, so not every new idea or change has to be fought for individually.

What grows on the foundation: realistic excellence

Only once the foundation is in place can it carry innovation in the long term. And since it's not us but you and your team who are the specialists in your field – and therefore the originators of innovation in it – user-centred thinking and design have to be established and embedded with you. Because innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum; it's always a response to real needs.

So the outcomes of maturity-minded experience design and strategy aren't just better usability, a clear UX strategy or service and product design solutions, but also a higher level of UX maturity in your team – and with it, more potential for innovation.

What the process can do for team, product and innovation potential:

• A confident team. Research-based decisions enable a team to act in an informed, planned way and to adjust course sensibly if something doesn't go as expected.
• A better product. Instead of settling the same fundamental questions over and over, you have less friction and more time and energy for finding creative, effective solutions.
• Room for innovation. Robust data and scalable concepts and designs pave the way for experience design that is user-centred, accessible and respectful.

Who the Truly XD process is for

The Truly XD process is aimed at value-driven organisations in the private and public sector – NGOs, universities, public institutions, media organisations and B Corps, for example – that are responsible for digital products and want those products to genuinely work for everyone, which includes their own team being able to sustain them. Because that's the only way an investment pays off in the long run.

Instead of impressive concepts nobody can implement, you get solutions that fit your team, your goals and your audience. Because we adapt scope and pace to your team's actual UX maturity, not to an idealised picture. So it doesn't matter whether user experience design has barely played a role for you so far or whether some structures are already in place: we start where you are today.

The result: digital products that fit their audience, help you reach your goals, and that your team can genuinely maintain and stand behind. Because we make user-centred design a team effort! Products that truly fit you – Truly YOU, in fact. And for us, those are the projects that really succeed. 💙