When striving to create the best products possible, it can be easy to fall into the trap of designing the way we think it should be based on our own experiences and/or we may not be given the resources required to really understand the users and how best to design for their needs. Even if you have experience designing similar products and have done prior research, not all of the learnings may be necessarily applicable to what you are creating now. To help with this process, there are probably many workflows you could use, but one process that is particularly popular is Design Thinking.
What is Design Thinking?
There are five steps in Design Thinking; empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. By themselves, each step is not particularly unique or groundbreaking, but grouping them together into a system has helped designers easily understand what is required to solve complex problems and truly create great products. It is a human-centered approach to design, and by focusing on the user's needs and looking at how they think and feel when using products, it is possible to design a product that is not just functional, but also enjoyable for the user.
Although the word "Design" is in the name, the Design Thinking process can actually be used in other disciplines and other areas of life to systematically and constantly improve something. It is an iterative process, so theoretically there is no end to it. As soon as you think that your product is 100% perfect, the product may end up falling behind competitors who are always changing alongside their user's needs.
The Design Thinking process
There are five distinct steps in the Design Thinking process, but they don't necessarily need to be followed in the given order depending on where you are in your current project. However, the first step "Empathize" is arguably the most critical step, as without it no matter how technically accomplished your product is, if it doesn't fit your user's needs, it will end up not being useful or enjoyable.
1. Empathize
In order to design for the user's needs and find out what problems they are having that you need to solve, you need to do user research. It is a critical phase in Design thinking and will allow you to empathize more with the users and understand their way of thinking and view of the world around them. Actions you can take during the empathize phase:
- Conduct user interviews
- User observations (if possible in their natural environment)
- Ask users to write a journal
- Bodystorming exercises to get first hand experience of what users do
- Create personas and customer journey maps
2. Define
After conducting all of the necessary user research, you then need to organize it and analyze it so that you can define concrete problems and actionable tasks. It is important here to really understand what the user's pain points are and really get down to what the root of the problem is. Although users may ask for certain features, simply adding the requested feature may not fix the root of problem or be applicable to other users. For example, if a user asks to have a simpler process to exchange the wrong size clothes on your online store, you may find that although that feature may also be required, the root of the problem may be that sizing should be made more clear on product detail pages and possibly even make it so that users can see how the clothes look on them before purchasing, such as with augmented reality.
After finding the user's pain points and root problems, you then need to write these out as well defined tasks so that during the next phases you can stay focused on what needs to be done. To define the tasks, writing them out as questions can help frame the problem into something that is easy to understand the end goal. Using the online store problem as an example, you might write questions such as "How can we make it easier for users to understand clothing sizes before purchasing" and "How can we make it easier for users to exchange the wrong size clothes".
Alongside these questions and tasks, you may then find it necessary to define the target goals and how the success of the solution should be measured. In this case, it might be measuring the decrease in the amount of inquiries about clothing sizes and how to exchange unwanted clothes. These goals can help various stakeholders understand why a solution is needed and how it will help the company overall. If the amount of inquiries decrease, customer services can focus their attention elsewhere and costs of exchanging the wrong size clothes can be reduced.
3. Ideate
Now that you have defined the problems you need to solve, it is time to come up with solutions. This is where you need to come up with all possible ideas, including the bad ones. In this phase, try to be as open minded as possible and consult with other people outside the design team so that there are ideas being generated with different and fresh perspectives. Make sure that everyone involved understands that voicing bad and crazy ideas can also be good, as they may lead to good solutions.
Hold brainstorming sessions with people from different teams and try to aim for quanity over quality to begin with, as they can be refined later on. Having a low quantity of ideas may be result in a narrow point of view and may not necessarily lead to the best solution. By discussing as team why an idea is potentially not an ideal solution will also help reduce friction later on in the stage if everyone has already had a chance to voice their opinions.
Once you have a a good of amount of ideas, you can then refine them and choose the best ideas that will potentially solve the problem in the most effective way. This will usually involve thinking about whether it fits the users' needs, are technically viable, cost effective, and match the business requirements. Everyone wants to have the best of everything, but if it costs millions of dollars over budget and requires a lot of skilled techinicians to realize it, then it is not a viable option.
4. Prototype
The prototyping phase is where the ideas begin to come to life, and although it can be exciting to design and build the best prototype, you should be careful to not waste too much time prototyping something that eventually does not work out well. There are different levels of fidelity when prototyping.
Low fidelity: This is a good place to start and usually involves creating some basic wireframes (perhaps even with pen and paper), and at this level doesn't require interaction. These prototypes can be iterated through quickly so that you can envision many different potential viable solutions. As with the ideate phase, this level of fidelity will allow you to gather many different ideas without narrowing down too quickly and potentially missing out on a better solution.
Mid fidelity: Depending on the level of resources available, this level may include designs closer to the end product with color and possibly even simple click through interactions that switch between different screens. This level is quite flexible and can be tailored to the amount of time you have and should still be simple enough so that a few iterations can be created.
High fidelity: At this fidelity, the prototype can have more complex interactions and possibly even be coded to work and look more like the real thing. Even without code, some design tools even allow you to have dynamic data and conditional effects. This level of fidelity can be difficult to achieve unless there is a high skill level within the team that have previous experience building prototypes. They also take more time to create, so unless the idea is absolutely settled or a lot of time and resources are available, it may not be recommended. However, with high fidelity prototypes, they are much closer to the final product, which means developers can work from something easy to visualize and also testing can be done more true to life before it even goes into full production.
Try to choose the appropriate level of fidelity so that resources do not get wasted, but make sure they can convey the ideas enough so that they can be tested.
5. Test
The testing phase is where your ideas will finally get truly validated. A good level of resilience and an open mind here will really help you understand what does and does't work as it can be easy to get attached to the ideas and prototypes you have been working hard on. Try to understand the testers' perspective as much as possible and if something isn't working well, be prepared to throw the idea away and start again. During the tests, don't lead the testers to certain opinions and let them explore by themselves. Just give them the tasks they need to complete and only step in when absolutely necessary to keep the test running smoothly.
Iterate, iterate, iterate
If you are starting a fresh project, you may find going through steps one to five of the Design Thinking process in order is the most effective way. However, if you are midway through a project or already have a complete product, you may find that you can start from a different step. For example testing your current product first in order to find the problems and pain points leading to the empathize stage. You can also going between steps as needed to make sure you are finding the best possible solution if time allows. During the prototype phase, you might find a problem with the ideas, so you go back to the ideate phase, or you create new prototypes are doing some testing.
The most important thing to keep in mind here is that once a product is released, it doesn't mean that it is 100% finished. Strive to constantly improve the product, but try not to mindlessly add features that end up making it too complicated for users to operate it effectively. As more users start using the product and it begins to mature, you may find a new type of user persona, or the current users have shifted their mentality. Technology is also constantly improving, so a previously unviable idea may now be possible. Make sure to stay up to date so that your product does not fall behind the competition.
Apply Design Thinking within a team and organization
Learning the Design Thinking process and techniques to improve your own work is a great step forward, however it is more than likely you are working as part of a team. This may not be applicable if you are a team of one, but in larger organizations where you have multiple designers, developers and product owners all working towards the same goal, it is necessary that everyone at least understands what Design Thinking is and how to use it to create better products. This can be especially important if feature requests come from outside the product design team. If the CEO asks for features that you know aren't wanted by users as decided by the user research you conducted, you need to be confident in the research you have done and present it to other people so that they can also understand the benefits of a human-centered approach to design. Make sure to teach and show your team what you have learnt and give examples of how it can help reach your company's goals faster.
It can be difficult to explain how Design Thinking can have a positive impact for the company if the managers only care about profits, resource costs and time taken to release a feature, but there are some clear benefits that should apply to most situations.
- By clearly defining problems before full development, it is possible to reduce costs and resources taken to design and develop the wrong features. It will also remove the cost of completely redeveloping the wrong feature.
- By constantly testing the product and getting feedback, they can be sure the product is performing well and be notified quickly if any problems arise. This means unnoticed problems won't cause the company to lose customers.
- By utilizing the research to create a product users actually enjoy using, users are more likely to come back and possibly even become evangelists for the product causing an exponential amount of user growth (which is potentially free marketing by social media).
- By iterating over the Design Thinking process and constantly improving the product, you can be more sure that you won't fall behind competitors (which would cause users to leave your product or never come back).
While explaining these potential advantages for the company, it will also become easier to make clear how Design Thinking can improve ROI (Return on Investment) and help reach their KPI (Key Performance Indicators) goals. This should make Design Thinking much more approachable and understandable for managers and stakeholders who are looking at the numbers.
Deeper Design Thinking
I have covered the basics of Design Thinking here, but like any other skill, it takes time and practice to really hone the skill so that process becomes quicker and solutions are more refined. Each phase is a whole topic (or even many books) by themselves and can contain many types of techniques. If you lack skills in certain areas such as the empathize stage, then study how to conduct better user interviews, or if you are more interested in the visual aspects then discover and learn the many tools used to create prototypes.
To get started with improving your Design Thinking skills, you can either introduce it at your current company for the next project, or if that isn't possible, create a self learning project and go through each step creating the necessary deliverables to bring your ideas to life for a fictional product. I recommend creating the following as a minimum.
- A mock user interview (a transcript of questions to ask).
- Personas and customer journey maps.
- A list of tasks and questions of problems and pain points.
- A brainstorm of as many ideas as possible.
- Prototypes at different levels of fidelity.
- A test transcript that includes the user tasks that need to be completed.