UX design thinking is an ideology and a process for solving complex problems in a user-centric way. It allows developers to brainstorm innovative ideas for delivering products users can truly enjoy and benefit from.
This type of design process is especially important in a market saturated with so many similar products, where it’s difficult for companies to stand out. By using a solution based approach, companies gain a competitive advantage through the production of appealing products or services.
Here, we explore the concept of design thinking as it relates to UX and illustrate what the five stage process involves. We’ll look at its main benefits and provide a few examples of successful scenarios where companies have applied this approach.
Defining User Experience Design Thinking
Before getting starting with any kind of user experience design and UX design thinking, designers and developers need to understand the basic principles of the process.
What is UX Design Thinking?
Design thinking is an iterative process that development teams use for practical and creative problem-solving. Using this non-linear process, developers generate creative solutions that tackle complicated and even largely unknown issues in the problem space of product development. It considers the needs, thoughts, and behaviors of real users to challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and create possible solutions. These solutions become prototypes that users get to test solutions, thus providing developers with valuable feedback.
This framework heavily relies on the methods and processes that designers use daily in the product development process. What sets it apart is the increased collaboration between designers and users and the emphasis on empathy. It focuses on humans first. Companies need to understand what sort of issues they face and how their products can help them. This practice differs from UX design on a few levels.
While this process focuses on finding solutions to user problems, UX design focuses on conceptualizing such solutions and ensuring their usability and accessibility. Design thinking works as a set of tools that UX designers can access throughout development to create great user experiences.
Key Principles
The key principles of UX design involve empathy, defining problems, ideation, prototyping, and testing. They’re especially useful for tackling poorly defined or unknown problems. Their main characteristics are:
- Empathy: To uncover the right problems, developers must identify with and have a deep understanding of the people they’re trying to help. This is why it’s so important to empathize with the users. To become more empathetic, developers should conduct thorough research to understand common pain points. They may do so through field studies, user personas, or user experience maps. This process is ongoing and influences many decisions throughout the process.
- Defining Problems: After getting to know their users and their pain points, designers must clearly define their problems by creating problem statements. They should make these points specific and user-centric. Otherwise, the framework derails because business goals overshadow the user’s needs. To define problems, the development team can map potential roadblocks, interpret user research, and plan logistical details.
- Ideation: With user problems defined, the process moves on to ideation. Here, the team generates new ideas that redefine the user experience for the project. The best way to achieve this is by brainstorming, word banking, and mind mapping to visualize thoughts clearly.
- Prototyping: Prototypes are a great way to build upon the ideas of the previous step. Using sketches, interactive wireframes, or even paper models, teams can gauge feasibility early on, without wasting time or money. Many of today’s collaborative design tools come with advanced prototyping features, such as animation.
- Testing: In the final stage of this process, users gain access to the prototypes and participate in moderate testing sessions. They have the ability to interact with the product and provide useful feedback in real-time. The design team then uses it to figure out which issues need addressing and what improvements must occur before launch.
The Design Thinking Process
The UX design thinking process includes five key phases. The team begins by empathizing with their users and understanding them in order to define their problems and ideate potential solutions. They narrow down the best ideas and give them life by creating prototypes. Users access and test these prototypes, providing the development team with feedback to build upon and improve the final product before releasing it to the market.
Phase One: Empathizing – Understanding The Users’ Needs
Empathy is the first step in this process. Companies need to put themselves in the shoes of their customers. They must have an understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve through research. This is crucial to a human centered design process such as design thinking, which involves setting aside company assumptions and gaining real insight into users and their wants, needs, and objectives.
Development teams must observe and engage with different people better understand them on a psychological and emotional level. To grasp what customers think about, what issues they have, and what they need, companies use methods such as listening, interviewing, and conducting surveys.
Phase Two: Defining – Stating Users’ Needs and Issues
This second stage of the design thinking process is where the team defines the problem by gathering their findings and trying to make sense of them. This is often referred to as the solving problems define phase. They try to understand which difficulties and barriers their users face, observe patterns, and identify urgent problems that need solving.
After synthesizing this information, developers then define core problems and obtain clear problem statements, framed in a user-centered manner. They’re the basis for the following phase of the process, where developers try to come up with ideas and solutions.
Phase Three: Ideating – Determining Potential Solutions
In the third stage, the team has a solid understanding of its users and a problem statement in mind. Then, it can begin working on potential solutions. Ideation stage sessions are creative meetings where team members work together to come up with as many ideas and angles as possible using various ideation techniques.
Through brainstorming, mind mapping, body storming, and provocation, team members can begin to “think outside the box” and look for many alternative solutions to the different problems users have identified. By the end of the ideation phase, the team should manage to narrow down their list of ideas to a handful that they can build upon and eventually test.
Phase Four: Prototyping – Building True Solutions
Prototyping is anexperimental phase in which developers identify the best possible solutions for each problem and try turning their ideas into tangible products. They create solutions in the form of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of their product, which incorporate the potential solutions defined in the previous stages.
Having a visual representation of the product facilitates the process of accepting, improving, redesigning, or rejecting different solutions, depending on how they perform in prototype form.
Prototypes enable businesses to discover the best ideas. They also make it easier to receive user feedback, improvise original ideas at affordable costs, and provide a clear image of what the final product could be.
Phase Five: Testing – Assessing Solutions
After prototyping comes user testing, where developers send the prototype to their users to truly determine if the product satisfies their wants and needs. After receiving feedback, team members often return to the previous stages to redefine new problems, fix bugs, and update the product accordingly. They must perfect the product before launching it.
There are several ways to conduct efficient user testing, such as remote user testing, A/B testing, and usability testing. Oftentimes, observation, interviews, surveys, and questionnaires are enough.
It’s quite normal to think that design thinking is a linear process, considering that all of these phases present a very logical sequence. However, this framework isn’t linear. In fact, it’s quite flexible and fluid. Each phase brings a new discovery that forces developers to rethink and redefine their previous actions. They often loop back to the early stages, rarely moving in a straight line.
Examples of the Design Thinking Process
Many of the most popular companies, apps, and websites of today utilize a design thinking process in their products and presentations of their businesses.
Airbnb
Airbnb is a multi-billion dollar online platform that started out earning only approximately $200 per week. This company is one of the best examples of design thinking. Founders recognized that the pictures that hosts posted of their places weren’t high-quality enough, deterring customers from using the platform and renting rooms.
Airbnb didn’t get many bookings because users weren’t sure what they were paying for. As a way to empathize with their users, the founders traveled to different locations, imagining what users would look for in a temporary place to stay. They then worked with different hosts, invested in high-quality cameras, and took better pictures of what customers wanted to see, based on the different travel destinations. They insisted on taking pictures of all rooms, listing special and attractive features and highlighting interesting neighboring areas.
This non-scalable and non-technical solution doubled the company’s revenue within a week. Airbnb used design thinking to determine why their users weren’t using their services and figured out how to make their listings more attractive with a few simple adjustments.
GE Healthcare
Another example of a company that focused on design thinking to improve a product is GE Healthcare. While their diagnostic imaging services had no issues, the company realized that there was a problem with how children reacted to the procedures.
These patients often cried while exposed to these long procedures that took place in cold, dark rooms. This prompted GE Healthcare’s team to observe pediatric patients in different environments, talk to experts, and interview hospital staff for more insight into their experiences. Empathizing with their younger patients led the company to create and implement the “Adventure Series”, an initiative focused on making MRI machines more child-friendly. For instance, the “Pirate Island Adventure” MRI room features pirate ships with scenery of beaches, sandcastles, and the ocean.
Providing a creative solution to these pain points helped increase patient satisfaction scores by 90%, which also led to improved scan quality, saving patients time and resources.
Oral B Electric Toothbrush
The design thinking process is also a great way to put initiatives to the test before implementing them. A good example of this is Oral B and their electric toothbrush. When the company wanted to upgrade their electric toothbrush, their request was to add more functions for users such as tracking brushing frequency, observing gum sensitivity, and even playing music.
Researching and interviewing the users allowed the development team to discover that people often feel nervous about not brushing. Accessing detailed data regarding their hygiene habits would only increase anxiety.
The empathizing and defining phases then led to the ideation of two solutions that could still improve user experience without adding complex features. These included making the brush easier to charge, especially for traveling users, and making it more convenient to order replacement heads by connecting the brushes to phones and sending notifications.
IBM Cloud
IBM used the design thinking mindset when creating Bluemix, which is now called IBM Cloud. This is a cloud platform for application development that helps developers in big companies create cloud-based apps faster and with ease.
By working closely with their target audience and correctly identifying their pain points and their needs, the company created a successful product that attracted more than a million developers. Its most popular features include:
- Offering a choice – Developers can create consistent applications that work both on and off-premise, reducing the cost and time associated with setting up infrastructure.
- Extensive tool catalog – IBM Cloud offers over 170 tools covering data, containers, AI, IoT, and blockchain.
- Methodology – This platform uses a DevOps toolchain. It allows development teams to easily scale their projects.
Benefits of User Experience Design Thinking
This concept is such a popular and important framework because it brings companies, development teams, and users a wide variety of benefits:
- Inspiring creativity and fostering innovation – Creativity leads the development of projects and products. The design thinking process allows for the collection of creative solutions by gathering inspiration from customers.
- Satisfying users – Before implementing any solutions, companies allow users to verify and test ideas. Developers take their feedback into account, making sure to only deliver the final product once it meets crucial user requirements.
- Putting humans first – Because this process focuses so much on empathy, businesses take real users and their experiences into consideration. They are much more likely to produce a truly useful and helpful product and hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences.
- Covering the entire company – This concept applies to many areas apart from design. Because it encourages group thinking and cross-team collaboration, it is suitable for virtually any team in any industry, such as business, education, and science.
- Easy to understand – This framework is quite easy to follow. There is really no required set of skills to implement it.
- Improving efficiency – With design thinking, developers can verify whether an idea or proposed solution meets user requirements without having to create a real product for testing purposes. This improves development efficiency, while also saving a lot of time and money.
- Reducing time to market – The great emphasis on problem-solving and finding viable solutions helps companies reduce the amount of time spent on designing and developing. This is especially true when developers combine the design thinking process with lean and agile methodologies.
- Reducing costs and improving ROI – By reducing a company’s time to market, this framework ultimately saves the business a lot of money and yields a significant ROI of up to 300%.
- Improving customer retention and loyalty – Relying on user empathy and its user-centric approach, the design thinking process helps boost user engagement and customer retention in the long run.
How to Incorporate Good UX in Your Designs
Companies can adapt many different strategies to incorporate good UX in their designs. The first step to creating a product with the ideal user experience is to obtain a deeper understanding of users and keep them in mind throughout the entire development process.
It’s important to consider what they might need from a product or service and how they feel at each touchpoint. The best tool to help imagine the experience of potential customers when creating a new product is customer journey maps.
Good UX designs remain accessible and work for everyone, including those who experience hearing and sight disabilities. Companies should conform to accessibility standards in their UX practices to increase the number of people that can interact with their products. Considering accessibility is another great way to empathize with the audience.
Consistency is another key UX design best practice. Maintaining consistent designs limits confusion, builds trust, and reinforces the brand. They allow users to learn how to navigate the UI faster, execute their tasks with ease, and avoid distractions or confusion.
Companies should pay attention to visual and functional consistency as well as maintain a consistent voice, tone, and familiar patterns.
When writing for users, businesses need to keep their copy clear, concise, and accessible so that users don’t have to guess about what they’re reading. Ideally, product copy should be at about an 8th-grade reading level and not require specialized knowledge.
Continuous testing is another important strategy for guaranteeing good UX designs. Companies need to conduct usability testing and leverage the resulting data to constantly improve their products. Testing methods like A/B testing, heat mapping, and recording live feedback from users interacting with the product are great methods. Depending on the results, developers should adjust their products accordingly and then conduct more tests.
Finally, selecting the right UX tools is crucial for success. Many tools exist on the market, but a select few stand out among their competitors. The most popular user research UX tools are UXCam, UserTesting, and Hotjar. Developers commonly choose to work with Balsamiq, AdobeXD, and Figma for wireframing and prototyping, while Overflow is a favorite flowchart UX tool.
Conclusion
A user-centric methodology, UX design thinking is an iterative framework based on the needs, thoughts, and behaviors of real users for practical and creative problem-solving. This process helps developers transform ideas into prototypes that users then have the ability to test and provide developers with actionable feedback.
The five main principles of this process include empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. These principles further define the process and divide it into five non-linear phases. Using design thinking when creating a product improves the product and the process by inspiring creative ideas, fostering innovation, and improving efficiency while also helping companies reduce their time-to-market and costs.
The design thinking process helps businesses innovate and create products that solve real user problems. The resulting solutions are not only visually appealing but also user-friendly, intuitive, and effective. By using this framework and following its key principles, companies create meaningful experiences for their users while driving innovation in their design projects. This reflects the core tenets of the design thinking ideology.
FAQ
What makes UX design thinking unique?
User experience design thinking has a few unique qualities that set it apart from other design methodologies. It is solution-based instead of problem-based, and it completely focuses on users’ needs. It is extremely simple to understand, and anyone can use it and apply it.
This framework uses methods that enable empathy, seeks to define the problem as actively as finding solutions, ideates and explores results, and solves many different types of problems. It is also inherently collaborative and involves prototyping, embodying the spirit of user centered design.
How can I use user research in UX design thinking?
User research is the study of user behavior when interacting with a specific product. It allows companies to understand what users think about their products and how they feel when using them. It is at the center of user experience design thinking and includes two important aspects: listening and observing users. Companies may conduct their user research in a few different ways, including using online surveys, conducting interviews, and creating user personas.
What are some common tools used in User Experience Design Thinking?
Development teams use a wide variety of tools throughout the different phases of the user experience design thinking process. The most popular ones include UXCam, UserTesting, and Hotjar for user research; Balsamiq, AdobeXD, and Figma for wireframing and prototyping; and Overflow for creating flowcharts. These tools aid in the process to create innovative solutions.
