Open Design Kit

Overview

Open Design Kit is a living collection of guides and best practices to help you to make and design openly. The project was created specifically with distributed teams in mind.

The Kit was originally incubated at Bocoup and became a community-owned project in Summer 2017. In Winter 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation took on the responsibility of sheparding the community and the project.

Open Design Kit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Process

Designing in the open means sharing with the right people at the right time – early and often. While this is a process, it’s more of a guiding framework because design is both nonlinear and iterative.

Discovery Phase: explore and define the right problem to solve for

Explore: The first half of discovery expands outward from the initial inspiration or problem, with research into stakeholder and user goals and needs, and any other relevant information for understanding the problem space, such as usage analytics. The output of the Explore mode is unstructured research findings.
Define: The second half of discovery makes sense of the unstructured research findings through diagrams and models to identify themes, challenges, and opportunities. The result is an accurately defined problem that enables stakeholders to converge on a strategy. The output of the Define mode is design synthesis and strategy.

Delivery Phase: make and validate the right solution

Make: The first half of delivery is creating multiple solutions of varying fidelity (whether sketches, wireframes, or prototypes) for testing. The output of the Make mode is testable prototypes.
Validate: The second half of delivery is testing and iterating on a narrowed-down solution and refining it through implementation. The output of the Validate mode is an implemented solution.

Methods

affinity diagram
design brief
design values
experience attributes
feedback session
human spectrogram
hypothesis definition
interface inventory
interviewing
journey mapping
mood boards
personas
site maps
style guide
style tiles
usability test

Recipes

Visual Design Workshop