Design Thinking
What is design thinking? Design thinking is a unique way of thinking, as well as a process for creating design solutions. It is concerned with solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way through inquiry and innovation.
In the design thinking process, a UX designer’s goal is to understand the underlying motivations of the user, reframe their problems, and challenge his or her own personal assumptions about the problem space. The design thinking process allows the designer to iterate and identify alternative solutions to a given design problem that are based on the end user and their needs. Design thinking is a conceptual way of approaching a problem through empathizing, thinking, ideating, and producing deliverables that document the stages of understanding the design problem.
Design-thinking has been adopted by major organizations, such as Apple, Google, and GE. This is because design thinking invests up-front in developing a complex understanding of the people who we are developing products for, and this results in economic payoff down-the-line through products that are thoroughly designed.
Let’s cover the stepwise process for design thinking outlined by Hasso Plattner from the Institute of Design at Stanford, also known as D-School:
- Empathize with your users
- Define their needs and problems
- Ideate a solution by challenging assumptions
- Prototype and sketch ideas and interactions to start creating real solutions
- Test those solutions with real users.
It is important to not that these phases do not always occur sequentially and can be done iteratively or be done in parallel during the process development lifecycle.
Quick Overview of The Design Thinking Process
Step 1 — Empathize
Learn about the user and understand their wants, needs, and goals. The first step here is to set aside your assumptions about the user, probably assumptions you have about the product from your personal experience, and gather real information bout the user through inquiry-based research.
Several tools you might use during this stage include Empathy Interviews and Empathy Maps.
An empathy map, as defined by the Nielson Norman Group, is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular sort of user. The empathy map externalizes knowledge about a user group in order to create a shared understanding of user needs.
Step 2 — Define
Define the problem to solve. Begin to make sense of all the information gathered at the previous stage. What challenges or pain points are users complaining about? Are there discernible patterns in the user feedback collected? By the end of this step, you will have a clear problem statement or point of view statement. As a designer, you will probably write one of these for every project you undertake.
Step 3 — Ideate
Now that you have a solid understanding of your users and you’ve defined their core problems, the creative problem-solving begins.
The goal of this stage is to generate ideas, including out-of-the-box and creative, unconventional solutions to the problem identified in earlier stages. A single designer or a group of colleagues can begin the ideation process to gather a series of ideas for solving the problems.
There are many techniques that can be used to ideate, such as brainstorming and mind mapping, to role play scenarios, like body storming and provocation. Crazy 8’s is a challenging exercise that asks a designer to sketch 8 distinct ideas in 8 minutes; the goal is to push past the first solution, which is sometimes the least innovative and generate a wide variety of solutions to your challenge. Fold the paper into 8 sections, and set a timer for 8 minutes.
Step 4 — Prototype
A prototype is an inexpensive, scaled-down version of a product to be shared with users. It incorporates the potential solutions identified during the previous stages. The prototype should be interactive, and it simulates how the solution will work when it’s built.
Prototypes vary in fidelity. A low-fidelity prototype could be as simple as a series of hand-drawn sketches assembled into a clickable solution. A high-fidelity prototype will incorporate information collected from low-fidelity prototypes into a clickable experience flush with attractive visual design.
You can make a prototype with pen and paper, or with Figma or Adobe XD.
Step 5 — Test
The goal of testing is to investigate and observe users interacting with the prototype, and adjust or iterate based on the user’s experience and feedback. Once you’ve tested your prototype internally amongst yourselves, it’s time to test it with real live users. Observing users using your prototype can lead you to go back to a step either to refine your problem statement, one of your assumptions, or some confusing portion of your design.
Usability Testing will ask potential users to navigate the prototype while metering and measuring their responses.
First ask, do users need my app? Second ask, can users actually use my app?
The design thinking process is not linear. With each discovery, comes the opportunity to refine your solution and make it more usable.
The Design Thinking Process, In Depth
Step 1 — Empathize
What exactly is empathy? Empathy is the ability to fully understand, mirror, then share another person’s expressions, needs, and motivations. In UX, empathy enables the designer to understand not only the users’ immediate frustrations but also their hopes, fears, abilities, limitations, reasoning, and personal goals. Empathic research is primarily concerned with facts about people, their motivations, inspirations, and thoughts. It’s inherently subjective, but it still holds validity as another tool in a designer’s arsenal of methods for creating usable products.
Users don’t always tell you what they need. People do not always convey all the details or communicate what they need in a standardized way. You’ll need to use empathy in order to really understand people. You will need to develop your intuition, imagination, emotional sensitive, and creativity to fully understand the scope of each problem.
To be successful, a product or service must be technically feasible to build and maintain. Then it must also turn a profit and solve a critical need for a user group willing to pay in order to satisfy its existence from a business perspective. Users must also deeply relate to your solution over other solutions for solving the same problem and be willing to trust your solution.
Products That Empathize With The User
For example, Google Glass was a failure on the company’s part because users didn’t like the experience and didn’t feel good using the product. By contrast, the iPod was very successful at not only providing a technological solution but also providing a completely desirable and profitable experience for countless users. As a result, Apple gained a market lead.
Note — Think about a time that you tried a product, and it either didn’t meet your needs or was frustrating to use. Did you continue using the product? Or did you move on to a different solution? This is the scenario that UX designers want to avoid by making sure that they understand what users will actually use.
While the empathize process may seem highly subjective, there are always deliverables that UX designers can produce to document the process of their work.
A Persona
A persona is a fictional user profile. Personas are used to communicate and summarize user research. Each persona has defined goals and characteristics, which are representative of the needs of a larger group of users. Designers use personas to represent many users at once because designing with an individual composite “person” is easier than trying to design for thousands of different people.
Empathy Map
An empathy map is a graphical tool used to help you imagine things from a user’s perspective. It usually asks you to answer some questions from a user’s perspective as they encounter a task, such as the following: What do they see and hear? What do they think and feel? What do they say and do? By writing down these imaginings, you can more clearly conceptualize your persona interacting with a problem.
Quantitative Surveys
A quantitative survey contains objective questions used to gain detailed insights from respondents about a survey research topic. Results from these surveys are used to gather numerical data and determine statistical results. This data shares insights about user behavior in a more quantitative way. Quantitative surveys can be useful for justifying decisions to key stakeholders.
Step 2 — Define
During the define stage, you are connecting the dots from the empathize stage. You analyze your observations and summarize them so that you can define the core problems that have been identified up until this point.
Problem statement
In this stage, you should seek to define the problem in a formal problem statement. The final problem statement is a simple but effective way to bring focus to the insights that you’ve uncovered.
Ultimately, when you are making decisions, you must always return to the question, “Does this solution solve the problem statement?” If the answer is “no,” then you have gotten off course. Ask this question frequently — you don’t want to produce a fully developed product and then discover that it does not actually solve the problem!
Note — In every project that you complete in this program, you will be asked to explain how your solution addresses your problem statement.
Competitive analysis report
A competitive analysis report outlines the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ solutions. Typically, a competitive analysis report contains a description of your business’s target market and details about the features of your product compared to your competitor’s products. It is beneficial to know what your competitors are offering, how you can improve upon existing solution, and what unaddressed problems you can find solutions for.
Step 3 — Ideate
Ideation is the process for coming up with many ideas. By this stage, you’ve built a solid foundation in discovering your users’ needs, identifying what problem you are trying to solve, and uncovering solutions exist out in the world already. Now you can finally start thinking about what you are going to make!
Some deliverables for documenting ideation:
Brainstorming
Most people are familiar with brainstorming. To get the most out of brainstorming, set a time limit. Try to focus on quantity over quality and write down as many ideas as you can. Do not worry about whether your ideas are practical, too expensive, or unrealistic. Just try to get down as many ideas as you can without judgment. The weirder or more outrageous, the better! This process can be done alone or in a group setting.
Mind Mapping
A mind map is a visual diagram that represents words, tasks, and ideas associated with a central keyword or idea. It doesn’t have to be restricted to just words; you can also use drawings or colors. Begin with writing one word that summarizes the problem that you want to solve or the idea that you want to build on. Then, from that word, draw lines out and branch off into new words that relate to the core issue. You can also use other elements, such as color or imagery. Use lines to show connections between ideas and solutions. Create subbranches for ideas related to the main branch’s ideas.
The following are examples of deliverables for documenting your design process through the ideation stage:
Sketches
Sketching is a crucial skill in UX design. Be wary of the impulse to skip it! If you can sketch simple shapes — like rectangles, squares, circles, lines, and stick figures — then you can quickly communicate concepts and revise them in minutes. If you can sketch quickly, you can share an idea and immediately influence the outcome of a meeting with stakeholders, instead of taking hours to make wireframes. Also, nothing is more frustrating than spending hours on wireframes and then having to scrap them completely and start over because there wasn’t an initial consensus on the direction of a design.
User Flow
A user flow is the path that a user typically takes on a website or app to complete a task. The flow leads from the entry point, through a series of steps, and toward a final action such as purchasing a product. User flows are useful to help demonstrate to other team members how a user interacts with an application. In some ways, this may sound similar to the experience maps that are described above. The key difference is that a user flow addresses a user’s interaction with a specific product and the exact flow of how they will click through the site.
User Stories
A user story (also called a use case) is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website. Each one is a documentation of a sequence of steps, starting with a user’s goal and ending when the goal is fulfilled. These user stories should clearly demonstrate how your solution resolves your problem statement.
Storyboards
In UX, a storyboard is a tool that visually lays out and explores a user’s experience with a product — similar to the storyboards that are used in movies. Storyboards are valuable because they provide context about how and why people use products. They provide insight into the users’ surroundings and goals, and they build relatable narratives.
Mood Boards
Mood boards communicate the artistic direction of a project. They are created through a collection of images, fonts, interactions, features, icons, and UI elements. It can be useful to look at different projects for inspiration about visual design and other features.
Step 4 — Prototype
In this stage, the design team produces some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product. These prototypes are useful for investigating the design solutions that were invented in the previous stage. Prototypes help a design team get a better idea of the challenges and constraints that are present for the project. Throughout the prototyping process, internal and external stakeholders to get a better idea of how real users will interact with the end product.
Examples of deliverables for the prototype stage:
Wireframes
Think of a wireframe as a blueprint that provides the basic framework for a prototype. The majority of the features are included, but they are not very detailed. Wireframes are valuable because they include enough features to conceptualize what the product will look like and how it will function without spending too much time on visual details like colors, images, and typography.
Prototypes
A prototype is a clickable series of connected mockups that simulates how the solution will work when it’s built. Sometimes it is difficult to explain a concept to team members. A clickable prototype that functions like the real software is meant to provide greater clarification.
Step 5 — Test
In this stage, designers go through the process of real-time testing. Although this can seem like the last stage before a product is sent over to the developers, design thinking is actually an iterative process. The results generated during the testing phase are often used to define pain points in a product’s design. Then the team might go back to the prototype stage and work through these issues before retesting the product again.
Examples of test deliverables:
Usability report
A usability report is a document that allows you to gain insight into user expectations and frustrations. It can be crucial in evaluating your product’s success. It provides insight into user frustrations and behavior, which can provide feedback and improve the product.
Analytics report
An analytics report is a custom report with dimensions and metrics that you decide. It’s a good way to explore custom information and deeper targeted metrics about your product.
Summarizing Design Thinking
Empathy is a critical skill in the user-centered design process because it augments design thinkers, allowing them to set aside their personal assumptions about products and gain insights into the lives and direct needs of the users.
While illustrating the design thinking process, we’ve introduced some key UX deliverables. Whatever the task at hand, it is essential that UX professionals communicate research findings and design ideas to a range of stakeholders and audiences. Deliverables offer documentation of the design process and show the depth of each decision arrived at throughout the design process.
Design thinking is user-centered and conceptual in nature. Many organizations have formalized the design thinking process in the conception of their products because companies that prioritize design have a competitive edge in the consumer landscape compared with companies that overlook how essential user experience is a consumer’s perception of a product.
