Empower Your Teams, Elevate Your Design
The ADEPT Team Framework, Concept Space Model, and Quality during Design
Our ADEPT Team Framework and the Concept Space Model provide the structured approach and targeted tools you need to navigate the critical "fuzzy front end" of product development and beyond, fostering true team synergy and leading to high-quality products. Quality during Design is a fundamental way of thinking and working that is integrated strategically and intentionally throughout the entire design cycle, starting from early concept development.
Your Playbook for Collaborative Co-Work
The ADEPT Team Framework
Effective team meetings are crucial for concept development, allowing diverse perspectives to be shared early. The ADEPT Team Framework is a repeatable process and checklist designed to help you plan and facilitate effective working sessions focused on gathering design inputs.
ADEPT stands for:
A - Align: Bring everyone to a common starting place by clarifying the scope and goals of the session. Meet your team where they are and lead them to a shared understanding.
D - Discover: Facilitate the generation of ideas and knowledge sharing, often using methods like brain writing to capture individual insights.
E - Examine: Summarize and discuss the discovered ideas to ensure team alignment and clarity on each concept.
P - Prioritize: Evaluate the ideas against defined criteria to identify which are most important for design inputs and next steps.
T - Teamwork: Close the session by agreeing on next steps, assigning actions, and ensuring follow-up to show how the team's work is valued and used.
Benefits of the ADEPT Team Framework:
- Provides structure for focused, purposeful meetings.
- Enables effective knowledge sharing by guiding directed co-work.
- Fosters team alignment and builds shared understanding.
- Offers a consistent approach that helps teams know what to expect and recognize the value of their collaboration.
- Makes it easy for everyone to participate and respects their time by focusing sessions and ending promptly.
Structuring Your Understanding of User Experience
The Concept Space Model
Knowing what to discuss in concept development is as important as how you discuss it. The Concept Space Model is a targeted tool used within ADEPT-guided sessions to structure the exploration of user experiences before diving into design solutions. It helps your team understand users and their needs more deeply and systematically.
The Concept Space Model focuses on three key areas of the user experience:
- Benefits: Explore the positive outcomes and value customers experience when the product performs as expected. Understanding benefits helps identify desirable features and informs design inputs based on customer satisfaction.
- Symptoms: Investigate the unintended outputs or negative impacts customers might experience. Analyzing symptoms helps anticipate problems, identify drivers (potential causes), and prioritize design actions to avoid negative outcomes, supporting reliability and risk management.
- Use Process: Map out the high-level steps customers take when interacting with the product. Analyzing the use process helps identify critical steps, potential pain points, and opportunities for simplification or enhancement, providing valuable inputs for interface requirements and user-friendly design.
Benefits of the Concept Space Model:
- Provides a structured framework for exploring customer experiences.
- Helps the team gain deep insight into users and their environment.
- Guides discussion to generate ideas specifically relevant to benefits, symptoms, and use process steps.
- Enables the team to prioritize ideas based on their impact on the user.
- Utilizes visual models and templates to enhance knowledge sharing and understanding.
The Power of ADEPT and the Concept Space Model Together
Used together, the ADEPT Team Framework and the Concept Space Model form a powerful system and playbook for team innovation and effective concept development.
ADEPT provides the how: the process for planning and facilitating team co-work, while the Concept Space Model provides the what: the structured content for exploring user experiences and concept ideas.
You apply an ADEPT cycle for each Concept Space Focus (Benefits, Symptoms, Use Process), allowing your team to systematically Discover, Examine, and Prioritize ideas related to that specific area. This combined approach ensures that your diverse team can collaborate effectively, breaking down complex ideas, ensuring shared understanding, and collectively defining key design inputs.
Transforming Shared Knowledge into Winning Design Inputs (Beyond Concept)
The insights gained using the ADEPT Team Framework and Concept Space Model aren't the final destination; they are the essential starting point for defining actionable technical design inputs. This is where the frameworks link with Quality during Design to truly empower your engineering and design process.
The information gathered during concept development sessions directly informs subsequent analysis and design decisions:
- Benefits analysis helps translate customer value into specific features and requirements, potentially using tools like matrix diagrams to link them.
- Symptom analysis feeds directly into risk assessment activities like FMEA, helping you design controls to eliminate or reduce potential problems.
- Use Process analysis provides the foundation for detailed task analysis and identifying potential use errors, ensuring your design supports a seamless user experience
These frameworks and the analyses they enable can be adapted and used throughout the entire product development process, providing a consistent method for team collaboration, analysis, and decision-making beyond the initial concept phase.
By leveraging the ADEPT Team Framework and the Concept Space Model, your team will reduce rework, improve design clarity, isolate problems faster, and build significantly stronger collaboration and buy-in, transforming shared knowledge into impactful, winning product designs.
A Philosophy and Methodology
The Quality during Design Approach
In Quality during Design, "Quality" is not treated as a final inspection or a checklist at the end of the design process. Instead, it is a philosophy that emphasizes the benefits of cross-functional team involvement in design and a methodology that uses quality tools to refine design concepts early.
Here's what Quality during Design means:
- Integrated and Proactive: Rather than "catching up with quality or reliability activities" late in development or doing analyses only after a prototype exists, quality thinking is weaved throughout the design process. It's about adding quality methods at strategic times during design development as part of routine design activities.
- Utilizing Specific Methods and Tools: This approach involves using a curated collection of quality tools and reliability techniques such as flowcharts, cause-effect diagrams, FMEA, and task analysis. These tools serve as visual models and templates to structure the process and facilitate teamwork.
- Driving Design Inputs: The primary goal of integrating quality early is to use the insights gained to generate and prioritize robust design inputs. This ensures that the design is based on early, fact-based information.
- Focusing on Customer Experience and Risk: Quality is directly linked to understanding and prioritizing the customer's experience. This includes identifying and designing for desired benefits and proactively addressing potential negative experiences or symptoms. This focus helps in managing risks. Understanding use errors is also part of this quality focus.
- A Mindset of Continuous Improvement: Applying these methods wherever possible, even if not strictly following the whole system, is embracing the quality mindset of continuous improvement.
In essence, "Quality during Design" means integrating structured analysis and fact-gathering methods early and continuously in the design process to ensure the product is developed with a clear understanding of customer needs, potential problems, and usability, leading to better design decisions and successful products.
Leading to Improved Outcomes: Integrating quality throughout the process helps improve communication, brings clarity in decision-making, leads to less struggle and frustration, decreases the number of design iterations, increases satisfaction of the team, results in fewer false starts and less rework, and ultimately leads to improved product quality and design excellence.
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