The Design Thinking Process

 As a Product Designer, I get asked a lot about my design process. There are a number of ways to answer this question, but being the visual person that I am, I decided to create a couple graphics to help explain the processes I use as well as the thinking behind those processes. 

This first graphic is really straightforward and gives a typical timeline of what I do when I am working on a project. 

Understand the Problem

I like to begin each project I work on seeking to understand what the problem is that I am trying to solve. Sometimes this can be quite easy, such as a direct request from a client to improve a very specific function because they aren't generating enough leads, or whatever other issue they might be having. Other times, the problem can be more vague. Perhaps we are trying to decide if there even is a problem to be solved at all. One such recent example in my professional life came when our team was asked to ideate on a possible "Living in Retirement" tool for our financial wellness platform. The assignment was quite open-ended, so we started with an ideation session where we all brainstormed what could possibly be beneficial to present to people in such a tool. 

I also like to understand business requirements and technical constraints at this stage. A good conversation with the upper-level executives and/or the developers at this point will help you to keep those constraints or business needs in mind when moving forward with the project and will save you time later on.

Observations and User Research

But back to that ideation session for the Living in Retirement tool...

Some great ideas came out of the session and we had some good initial ideas, but we followed up the session with more open-ended need finding interviews with retirees to chat with them about what it's like living in retirement and what they have found to be some of the most important considerations people who are soon to retire or currently living in retirement might want to keep in mind. This helped us to gain a deeper understanding of the kinds of problems we might want to solve and gave us a lot of insight into how to proceed with building the tool. 

See from the User's POV

At this stage of the process, I usually create user personas so I can see the product from the user's point of view. Some people argue that user personas are a waste of time, but I would argue that they are incredibly valuable. The first reason is that it is easier to fulfill a user's needs when we can imagine their point of view. It helps us to build empathy for users and design to solve specific problems those users might be having. The second reason this is useful is that you will eventually need to present this project to stakeholders or executives, and telling a story is a powerful way to show how you have solved a problem. User personas allow you to tell a story about who your users are and how you are solving problems for them, specifically, instead of just presenting a series of screens and calling it a day. 

Ideate and Explore Hypothesis

At this point, it's time to start coming up with ideas! Hypothesize how your ideas will help to solve the problem and come up with user flows and user journeys to help explore whether or not your ideas are feasible. You might also do a card sorting exercise at this point to help organize the information in your project. 

Design and Prototype

I love to start this stage with simple hand drawn sketches or very quick sketches made in a program such as Balsamiq, so I can get out as many ideas as possible and see what looks like it might work best. This is a time to build wireframes and turn them into interactive prototypes. It's also a great time to check in with other designers or stakeholders on the project to address any concerns or to get feedback. 

Test and Validate

It's time to put those ideas to the test! Take your interactive prototypes and test them out with real users, others on the design team, stakeholders, and really anybody you think might have good insights into the project. Usability testing falls under this stage of the process, and this is such a crucial step. You will gain incredibly valuable insights at this stage, and at this point I will go back to the design and prototype phase to fix any issues that came up during usability testing and further refine my designs. Then, back to testing and validating to ensure the new updates make sense. There may be some back and forth at this stage, but once it's good to go, we will move on to the next stage...

Tell a Story

At this point, we may need to do a presentation to justify our design decisions to managers, stakeholders, clients, or others. I encourage you to show your research to explain how you came to the conclusions you did, and use that user persona to tell a story about that user's journey through the product. You may receive feedback at this stage that could prompt some more updates to the product, so be prepared for that as well.

Present

At this stage, you're ready to hand off your design to the developers. It's important at this stage to make sure everything is packaged up for them in a way that they will easily understand what it is they are supposed to be building and that they have access to all the relevant information on components to use, images and icons, functional specs written out, etc.

Beyond...

That's the basic design process I follow, but it isn't the end. After handoff to the developers, I will follow the progress through the development cycle and run some QA tests once they have built it so I can see if everything is working according to my designs and plans. If not, I will chat with the developers to troubleshoot and ideate on how we can fix the problem. If there are issues to fix on my end, I will work to design solutions to those problems. Once everything is good to go and it gets released and deployed to live, I will start analysis on it. This could mean setting up Google Analytics or HotJar analysis to see heat maps, scrolling behavior, or videos of it in use. We will start to measure the success of the project and, if needed, work on plans to begin to improve in the next iteration.


I hope you enjoyed this description of my design process, and I hope it helps you to better understand how you might approach UX design in some of your own projects!