Design Thinking
What is Design Thinking ?
Design thinking is an iterative problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding users' needs, generating creative solutions, and delivering innovative and human-centered designs. It provides a framework for designers, product managers, and teams to approach complex problems and develop meaningful solutions.
Stages of the Design Thinking Process :
Understand: In order to solve a problem, you need to understand a problem. This first stage in the Design Thinking Process is all about taking the initial step towards understanding the problem at hand. You’ll create problem statements and perform competitor analysis to ensure you understand not only what you’ll create but the landscape you’ll be creating it in, as well.
Observe: In this second stage of the Design Thinking Process, you’ll be performing user research in order to observe your potential users and determine their needs and goals. User interviews and surveys fall under this stage.
POV: In this stage, your goal is to step into the shoes of your users and “see” your product from their point of view. This is the reason why we create design personas! The closer we can get to our users, the greater our chance of fulfilling their needs efficiently.
Ideate: Now that you’ve collected all these observations, it’s time to make ideas out of them. This is the part of the creative process that allows you to explore a wide variety and large quantity of diverse possible solutions. The purpose of ideation is to move beyond the obvious in order to explore a full range of ideas. User flows/journeys and card sorting falls under this category.
Prototype: This is the experimental stage of the process. Transform your ideas into a physical format so that they can be experienced and interacted with by others. Build wireframe after wireframe, then turn them into interactive prototypes (after receiving feedback, of course). Throughout this process, additional insights and empathy-building will occur.
Test: In this stage, you’ll be testing your prototypes with real users, collecting feedback, then improving and iterating on your designs again and again. Validating your designs in the early stages is a great way to solve problems before they reach a product development team. Use observations and feedback from people to create new hypothesis before starting the process over.
Tell Story: As designers, we oftentimes must justify our design solutions to colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. This step is all about explaining and defending design decisions via effective storytelling while still being open to critique and feedback.
Present: This comes after you've prepared all of your research, design solutions, and prototypes and are confident that your design is ready to be handed off to the developers. Your goal at this point is to communicate what developers should code based on your blueprints.
Design Thinking Tasks :
Research your Market Space
SWOT/Competitive Analysis : Try to find 5-10 points (strengths & weaknesses) from a product that is already available in your market space (competitor). This is Understanding your market space.
User Interviews : Gather data from those engaged with your product already; Have an honest conversation with your users. This step helps in finding the true pain points from your market rather than working on your own make-believe problems. This constitutes observing your market.
Create Personas : Based on your interview with your users, chalk down what their goals and wants are. Try capturing details like - user demographics, needs, goals, emotions, behavior, fear and limitations.
User Flows : Capture the user journey from the stage the client comes in contact with your product till he/she leaves, i.e. outline the steps that a user takes to complete his task.
Card Sorting : Information Architecture. Index the information under the correct headings.
Prototype : Create a wireframe and then a prototype.
Usability Testing : Test the primary steps that were identified during the Research.
To summarize, the importance of Design thinking lies in its user-centered and collaborative approach to problem-solving. It helps the teams break free from assumptions and biases, promotes creativity and innovation, and enables designers to create solutions that truly meet users' needs. Because isn’t that our goal all along!
