HOW WE USE THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS AND THE UX METHODS TO CREATE SUCCESSFUL PRODUCTS

According to Steve Case, we are living in the third wave of the internet, where the online has stopped belonging to companies. In this context, most of the products are not just connected to the internet, but this connection in and of itself is what defines them. In the third wave, we can't talk about the Internet of Things anymore, but we can call it the Internet of Everything.

As more and more physical and digital products are being launched – and there is a lot of competition in each market and industry –, it is harder and harder to be successful. This is why, in the past decade, a lot more companies invested in User Experience, as they realized how vital it is, not just to create a customer-centered product, but also to avoid spending a lot of resources after the release.

For every dollar invested in UX, a business can expect to make a hundred dollars return. According to Forbes

And you might say that all this is not a big deal, but here are some more stats about the importance of investing in User Experience in the early stage of creating the product:

• Think of the developers. It's estimated that they will spend up to 50% of their time on changes and rework. Fixing each glitch after launching the product will cost substantially more than fixing it during the prototyping phase.

• Do you want ambassadors for your product? Focus on making your product user-friendly. Almost 90% of customers trust word of mouth more than online reviews. So, a customer-oriented product that makes the user happy will attract more and more customers. Harvard Business Review reported that over 20% of satisfied customers told 10 or more people about the experience.

• Consider the revenue advantages. Companies that invested the most in User Experience had a sales increase of 75%, according to this Design Study – not to mention the added impact on customer retention and engagement that also had an impressive increase.

The Design Thinking Process and how to apply it

When you think of design, you may have in mind posters, logos, buttons, and the visually appealing stuff from the interface. However, all these elements are related to the User Interface and are just a part of the Design Thinking process. So how can the complex concept of design thinking be comprehensively defined and why is it used by leading companies like Apple, Google, or Samsung? According to Interaction Design Foundation:

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases — Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

All variants of Design Thinking embody the same principles, which were first described by Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon in The Sciences of the Artificial in 1969. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on the five-phase model proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which is also known as d.school. We’ve chosen d.school’s approach because they’re at the forefront of applying and teaching Design Thinking. The five phases of Design Thinking, according to d.school, are as follows:

• Empathize – with the user and the stakeholder's goals

• Define – your users’ needs, their problems, and your insights

• Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions

• Prototype – to start creating solutions

• Test – solutions

Double Diamond Design Thinking

Developed in 2005 by the British Design Council, the process includes four main stages, inspired by the classing Design Thinking model:

1. Discover. The first diamond helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. It involves speaking to and spending time with people who are affected by the issues.

2. Define. The insight gathered from the discovery phase can help you define the challenge differently.

3. Develop. The second diamond encourages people to give different answers to the clearly defined problem, seeking inspiration from elsewhere and co-designing with a range of different people.

Deliver. Delivery involves testing out different solutions at a small scale, rejecting those that will not work, and improving the ones that will.

Applying the Methodology

After setting up the introduction and the theory about the Design Thinking and the User Experience, we will run you through the practical side of it, step by step, along with explaining what the deliverables are, and the Why, When, and How to use them.

Planning and Discovery Methods

The practice of User Experience must begin with a plan and a discovery session. These methods will give focus and guidance for the long-term success of the product. To begin with, we need to ask the following questions:

• What do we plan to fix or improve through user experience design?

• What is the high-level vision for the resulting experience?

• What is the opportunity?

• How will UX integrate with the other parts of the product development?

This being said, here are the methods we use for the first phase of the process.

The KickOff meeting – We will meet with the stakeholder to ask about his objectives, his vision of the product, the requirements, and learn about all the other details regarding the project.

Use when – a new project is launched

The Lean Canvas model – Lean Canvas is a planning method that helps us get to the heart of our idea. It allows everyone to be on the same page, helping you to set out the key information that you need, without any unnecessary details.

Use when – a bird's eye view of the overall project is needed

UX Project Plan – This is separate from the overall Project Plan. The UX Project Plan helps us think about all the work that will be required for creating the product. This Abraham Lincoln quote eloquently embodies the purpose and principle behind this method: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

Use when – a new project is launched

Strategy Worksop – We use this method in order to leverage the collective wisdom of the team and to establish preliminary visions and strategies for the user experience of the app. We will listen to all the parts involved in the project and set up the first draft of the plan.

Use when – the team needs prioritization / a shared vision needs to be developed / a new project is launched

Research Methods

The best way to create a user-friendly product is to start with the users in mind. This is why we need to offer our undivided attention to user research. It is an exploratory period in which our purpose is to gain useful information, spend time with the users, and eventually learn and understand their problems and needs.

Learning Plan – Before diving into the research phase, we need to see what we already know from the internal discussion and the information given by the stakeholder. The learning plan will contain a table where we will display the information we collected from the users. What are our assumptions and how the research methods will need to be taken?

Use when – a new project debuts and knowing more about users is necessary

User Research – UX research methods are ways of generating insights about your users, their behavior, motivations, and needs. There are many ways to do user research: surveys, field research, experiments, and secondary data analysis. Depending on the project, we might use more than one method to collect the user pieces of information.

Use – tor any project

Proto Personas – A proto-persona is a description of the target users/audience of a product based on the assumptions of stakeholders. Creating proto-personas will allow the product teams to begin designing and building immediately, without getting overly bogged down with the details of user behavior

Use when – a clear and specific way of presenting the users is needed

Comparative Assessment – It is a variation of the competitive analysis, where we focus on similar other products and not just companies. It is a good way to start talking about what the optimal experience should be.

Use when – we need to establish a clear vision of the product

Content Patterns – Content patterns are blueprints made of words. If you have a lot of content items of the same type, designing the content layout in the same way and repeating content elements is a good idea. Content patterns reuse the same word structures, so only unique content, additional to those structures, jumps out at the user.

Use when – we need to set up the structure and the information and the capabilities of the product

User Journey – It refers to a diagram that explores the multiple (sometimes invisible) steps taken by consumers as they engage with a service. This method allows designers to frame consumer’s motivations and needs in each step of the journey, creating design solutions that are appropriate for each.

Use when – we need to visualize the journey process

User Stories – User stories are short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability, usually a user or a paying customer.

Use when – a clear idea of how the user will interact with the product is needed

Design Methods

Following the Discovery and Research phases, we will dive into the Design Phase. The list below contains the most common methods and techniques used by UX Designers, as they create great experiences for users. For each item on the list, you’ll see additional links with some of the best practices available.

Design Brief – A design brief is a document accompanying the design project. It is developed in consultation with the client/customer in order to outline the deliverables and scope of the project, including any products or works (function and aesthetics), timing, and budget.

Use when – starting the design phase of the project

Sketches – Our design team will start to sketch the first iterations of the product on paper. The idea is to keep the sketches fast, rough, and dirty. This helps us worry less about design aesthetics and focus more on the rapid formulation of ideas.

Use when – we start to explore design ideas

Task Flows and User Flows – Task flows tend to be linear, showing the high-level steps that a person would take to get to a specific goal or endpoint. Task flows don’t usually branch out with options or decision points, are generally linear and sequential, and are meant to be simple, rather than complex.

User flows, on the other hand, tend to show a specific persona’s pathway through the design at hand**. A set or series of task flows can be embedded within user flows. However, unlike task flows, user flows include decision points wherein the persona’s journey to the desired goal can differ, based on decisions the persona needs to make in interacting with the design**. User flows also tend to have multiple types of elements, such as key pages (for websites) or key screens (for apps), user actions, user decision points, and system decisions. User flows are also generally more complex than task flows, with multiple ways to begin/enter and end/exit the flow.

Use when – we need a complete picture of how the broader UX hangs

Wireframes – Wireframing is a process that involves overviews of interactive products drawn by designers, in order to establish the structure and flow of possible design solutions. These outlines reflect user and business needs. Paper or software-rendered wireframes help teams and stakeholders ideate toward optimal, user-focused prototypes and products.

Use when – we are ready to explore the details of the product

Testing and Validation Methods

Low Fidelity Prototypes – Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototyping is a quick and easy way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts. The first and most important role of lo-fi prototypes is to check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product.

Use when – validating the UX interaction

Style Guide – A style manual, or style guide, is a set of standards for the design of documents, website pages, signage, and any other form of brand identifier. The reason for their existence is to ensure complete uniformity in style and formatting wherever the brand is used.

Use when – we need to discover the visual part of the app

Mockups – A mockup is a static design of a web page or application that features many of its final design elements but is not functional. A mockup is not as polished as a live page and typically includes some placeholder data.

Use when – we present the first design iterations of the product

Five-Second Test – Five-second testing is a user research method that helps us gauge users' first impressions of a design. In a five-second test, participants are shown an image of a landing page or screen for five seconds and then asked a follow-up question about what they saw.

Usability Testing – Usability Testing, also known as User Experience (UX) Testing, is a testing method for measuring how easy and user-friendly a software application is. We test our products with a small set of target end-users, using a software application to expose usability defects. Usability testing mainly focuses on the ease of using the application, flexibility of the application to handle controls, and ability of the application to meet its objectives.

Conclusion

When we set up the overall process of creating user-centered products for us and our clients, we start designing with users in mind. In the end, with the help of Design Thinking principles, we make sure to understand the user’s needs, feelings, and emotions.

Furthermore, our process doesn’t stop here. After the testing phase, we will start the implementation, where we ensure that our development team was involved from the beginning to have everything in place before starting building the product.

Finally, before the launch, another testing session with users will be needed to make certain that the product is ready to be released. This process will start anew when updates and other features will be required, from discovery and ending with testing again.