The Design Thinking Process - An Introduction

what is design thinking in this snippet from one of our live events ux designer cameron talks you through everything you need to know about design thinking covering why it's important for the industry and how it can help you as a designer visit our events page for more events like this you'll find the link in the description if you have any questions about ux design or design thinking process post them in the comments we'll get back to you as soon as possible now let's dive straight in so design thinking is both an ideology and a process

it's all about solving complex issues in a user-centric way so design thinking was created as a way of taking the process and approaches of designers and using them to solve problems that designers don't typically encounter so it's the mindset of a designer applied to these problems and what you'll you'll often find is the problems are defined as wicked problems and so what a wicked problem is is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete contradictory and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize so that's a really big difference that you

have to focus on is what types of problems that design thinking focuses on and i'll explain what a wicked problem is i feel like that's not a good breakdown but it's a good definition so the difference between these problems is let's take a complex problem for instance so this would be like playing chess and what you have to do in chess is take the other person's king and defend your own and uh it's pretty straightforward game with pretty straightforward rules but a wicked problem let's say is how to properly educate a child so you have

to now think what does it mean to educate a child properly what does that look like what's the end result um will it work for all children from subject to subject so physical science versus social studies and um testing in different environments so there's so many other factors and even if you solve one another problem occurs so that's the difference between a regular problem even just a complex problem or a wicked problem so the next thing i want to talk about is this quote from linda neyman the ceo of creativity at work she has a

great quote and it says design thinking draws on logic imagination intuition and systemic reasoning to explore the possibilities of what could be and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user and so design thinking design mindset is not problem focused it's solution focused and action oriented so it involves both analysis and imagination i really thought that was a good uh quote but what you want to take from it is the types of problems so the designer's mindset applied to these wicked problems so the next thing we'll be getting into is the phases of design

thinking of the process and if you google design thinking this is typically what you'll find the image of these hexagons lined up and the process is typically divided into five phases empathize define ideate prototype and test so even though it looks like a straight line you have to understand that it's not a linear process so after each phase you'll need to redefine and reassess your previous goals and assumptions so you have to go back and there's also a lot of complexity in each phase as well as a lot of overlap so try not to go

too deep just give you the basic just general understanding of each phase and how to work how it works so phase number one the empathize phase so this is spent getting to know your user and the problems they face so you observe them and engage with them to understand them on an emotional and psychological level so let's say you don't know your user you're not aware of the the industry what you would do is call preliminary or preparatory research and this is pretty much just taking the time to get to know the industry get to

know competitors similar products comparable experiences or other services that are in that industry and it's very important to note this i cannot stress this enough only through proper research can we know what the user's thinking and feeling all things beyond that beyond proper research are just guesses assumptions or pretty much arrogance you want to leave those out of your process i'm telling you this is very important proper research so the tools for this phase for the empathize phase these are just a few there are several but you can do group interviews uh you can do

as-is scenarios and this is ibm's tool they uh so what you do is you map out what the user is currently experiencing uh like step-by-step uh mind mapping where you take the general concept and you trace the terms out and connect them uh empathy mapping where you figure out whether what the user is thinking feeling and doing and um you have the user in the center it's like a quadrant they have seen empathy maps before so one thing that i constantly encountered most of the times working with startups is just skipping the empathize phase just

feeling like it's not necessary so half of my job was convincing the ceo of the importance of research and sometimes you can't get valid insights from the ceo and interviewing them but it's always best to go straight to the source and remind them that they are not the user the next thing is just having too many assumptions and assuming that you know what they're thinking it's very helpful to remember not to judge what you observe but to ask questions question everything so even if you find an insight ask the user why and continue to ask

why and validate your observation through their own understanding and not your assumption of what it is that you think you're seeing so the next thing is phase number two so define and this is where you take all the insights from the empathize phase and you start to put them together and get a sense of what the problem is and the needs of the user and so pretty much it's just the synthesis of the data and the end result is a problem statement okay so you're going to look for patterns themes relationships between the information and

if you're familiar with the ux process is comparable to analysis the analysis phase tools for this particular phase are storyboarding where you map out you draw it's pretty much a visual of what your user is experiencing you can do personas where you take your insights from the entire group of users and you you kind of boil them down to persona you have prioritization matrices where it's uh you have a quadrant of four and you start to group the problems and um and uh you pretty much based them off like precedence which one is more important

than the next and then big idea vignettes where you have one idea and you kind of work backwards so what would the solution look like so if you so if you already had the solution what would the user's end result be and how would they feel and that's where it's like working backwards that's a really good tool and so the obstacles of this phase uh so having too broad or too narrow of a focus and so if it's too narrow you miss out on opportunities um and if it's too broad your problem becomes uh too

convoluted and so the next obstacle is just not framing your problem statement in a user-centric way so phase number three and so at this point it's time to get creative so this is where you begin to generate the ideas for that innovative solution and remember that no idea is a bad idea so this this particular phase is split in two but most of the time um you'll see that it's not they they have it lumped together but i believe there's a difference between creating an idea and deciding on an idea in a group setting it's

it's a bit difficult because you know when you're by yourself you can pick whatever it is you like but the skill for deciding on an idea in a group setting is definitely something i think is important to to to separate and distinguish the questions you want to ask is what will wow them what outside of what's realistic will wow them and also take into consideration the data that you have so the question you could ask is with all the data i've gathered what solution could solve one or more of the user's problems and then you

can kind of pinpoint ways to to combine um problems later you want to focus on one at a time definitely and the next the next um in ida tools for ideation the ideation process are time boxing where you split you split up your group and everyone goes a separate ways and takes like a minute and they come back and then you have brainstorming uh sketching so just having a visual of what it is the idea it kind of helps to to draw it out instead of just have it written and dot voting so this is

once you've narrowed down um yeah once you've narrowed down your solution you can vote so you so if you're in a group and everyone is given three dots you have 10 ideas and so everyone would put a dot on the idea that they think should move to the next phase and at the end whichever has the most dots is the one that moves on so it kind of alleviates that that the issue of one person thinking that this is more important than the next and the group coming together and deciding so the pitfalls or obstacles

to avoid is just simply not thinking outside the box not really digging deep for those innovative ideas and um throwing out too many and so the next thing is is not deferring judgment and like i said with with brainstorming and having that environment where you facilitate the the the comfort the the the safe space to to generate ideas and encouraging the wild ones and not thinking hyper realistically all right so phase number four prototype so this is where you turn um your idea into a tangible product a rough model or a sketch and prototypes are

pretty much a scaled down version of your product and it the way that your user will respond to it will depend on whether it may it's going to be rejected reconstructed or accepted and let me say that prototypes should not take much time to make the goal of a prototype is not to have um a working model but to give form to an idea some designers or some design thinkers believe that the first iterator the first iteration in your in your process is is not valid until you get to a prototype so until you have

a working or a model where your user can interact with it it's not valid and i don't agree with this but i understand why there's this belief i believe that any time spent with the user is valuable but it's extremely important the information you get when you see the user do something you didn't expect or even break something it's just that information is is it carries so much more weight than you know you will for me at least taking that time to to see them interact with your product um and also another thing is on

on multifunctional teams prototypes can sometimes be misinterpreted or misunderstood so like what an mba and what engineer and marketers believe our prototypes are different than what designers believe so it's good when you are working in a group with different people is to go ahead and clear that expectation of what the prototype is supposed to do so like i said giving form to an idea and questions to ask during this phase are what features do the prototype need to communicate does the prototype need to communicate to the customer and what can be removed so not having

too much complexity and making sure that you focus in on what it is that um you need to to test with this prototype first i'm starting with with the tools that you need in the prototyping what you can use in the procedure phase so pencil and paper uh simple if you're using if you're doing going for like a digital platform sigma's good go mockingbird is good it's another platform for for wires 3d modeling software is also good and just anything you have available is also good so let's go over the obstacles of this phase like

i said adding too much complexity to a prototype and not like not honing in on what it is that you're actually testing for and uh spending too much time or too much money on a prototype supposed to be a quick process all right and now we're down to the last phase phase number five this is test so this is it's pretty much just exactly as it sounds you test your solution i invite your user to respond and interact with your prototype and this will this will inform you to whether you need to kill your idea

or move forward and you don't want to if you need to kill your id you don't want to have to invest additional resources and we'll talk more about that um in the pitfalls but the questions you want to be asking during this phase is um is the solution useful is it usable is it desirable efficient and effective and how how does the user feel about your idea and what feedback do you have listening to that feedback i don't stress that enough all right so tools for testing you can do usertesting.com jar or just maintaining that

access to you the person that you're designing for at all times so the obstacles that i have is listening to the the action of what the user is saying to you during this testing phase another big thing is also i found with startups that the lack of funding sometimes can be an issue because if you don't have the time to go back and iterate on what it is that you need to um you'll want to push your product forward forward regardless of whether or not the tests reveal that maybe there's not a market for it

or maybe the idea that you you chose to go forward with is just not right for for your user it's it's just not being able to to to go back and start from scratch or start from a earlier phase so that's one of the pitfalls i found thank you so much for watching if you have any questions about design thinking let us know in the comments if you want to learn more about ux and ui subscribe to our youtube channel if you want to find out if ux and ui are for you we have three

short courses covering both of these areas and the links for those are in the description below thanks for watching see you next time you