Both UX design and UI design share a core value – user-centricity.
But hitting a home run with users isn’t always straightforward (imagine what that world would look like?).
So, it’s normal for designers to adopt all sorts of iterative approaches to improve their products for their users. However, not every designer knows about the design thinking UX process. If you’re one of those designers, you are indeed missing out on a straight shot at success.
So, what is design thinking? Well, in today’s guide, you’ll find out!
So, About Design Thinking…
The design thinking approach is one of iteration. Of course, it is – both UX designers and UI designers use it, after all.
But what exactly is design thinking?
Design thinking combines the principles of human-centered design with creative solutions to problem-solving.
It sounds like a good approach to adopt, undoubtedly, but what’s to stop you from using other ideation processes?
Well, the design thinking process focuses more on finding the solution to a problem rather than the problem itself. It also emphasizes the significance of the people – your users – who experience the problem and require innovative solutions.
As a result, businesses that adopt design thinking approaches can focus more on the people they create products for. And we don’t need to tell you what user-centricity does for a business’s sales volume and profit margins.
The Benefits of Design Thinking
If design thinking isn’t selling itself already, we’re here to give it a helping hand. Below, we’ve explored some of the most significant benefits of design thinking.
1. User Empathy
You simply can’t have design thinking without user empathy.
The design thinking process encourages you to try to understand your users’ perspectives and pain points. You’ve got to place yourself in your users’ shoes.
If you don’t, you run the risk of creating design solutions that don’t solve anybody’s problems. Design thinking will help you avoid such mistakes.
As an added bonus, the empathy within design thinking can inspire your users to trust your brand more. Just think of that loyal user base.
2. Clear Communication & Collaboration
Design thinking is a process where you can’t just have the UI/UX designer’s input. You need your users. A few skilled web developers wouldn’t go amiss either.
Design thinking encourages you to communicate and collaborate with cross-functional teams and target audiences.
By working together during the design thinking process, you won’t just access your users’ perspectives. You’ll gain insights from your other team members’ perspectives, making it so you can share ideas with ease.
Aside from the positive effect communication and collaboration have on workplace culture, you’ll find it easier to create better products.
3. Alignment With Business Goals
Your users can’t take all of the spotlight. You need to incorporate your business’s objectives into your design criteria, too.
Design thinking’s user-focused approach makes it so that every team member understands the primary goal – user satisfaction. Regardless of department, skill set, or metrics, design thinking focuses everyone’s efforts toward that primary goal.
When everyone in your organization works toward improving the user’s experience, they also work toward the business’s goals more effectively.
So, if you feel like your teams are all over the place with no alignment or unity, use design thinking. You’ll find that aligning your design solutions with your organization’s objectives is much easier.
4. Mitigated Risks
It’s a huge financial risk to release a product without prior testing and iteration.
The bright side of design thinking is that you can test solutions and create prototypes before you finalize them. You and your team can identify any issues and resolve them before investing a significant amount of time and resources.
Essentially, design thinking reduces the risk of creating and investing in a product that won’t resonate with its users.
Design Thinking vs. Human-Centered Design
We previously mentioned that design thinking involves the principles of human-centered design (HCD). But knowing that won’t help you understand the design thinking methodology if you don’t know what human-centered design is.
Human-centered design is a problem-solving technique that focuses on the real people that your design decisions impact. Designers who utilize the HCD methodology want to understand their users’ needs, behaviors, and experiences better.
Why? Potential design refinements. The accommodation of the user’s unique desires and challenges. User empathy. Take your pick – they are all correct.
So, it begs the question of how HCD differs from design thinking. After all, they both prioritize the real users of digital products, and both employ user research and user testing methods. Both processes take an iterative approach to problem-solving and product development.
But, design thinking goes beyond the users’ needs and combines what they know of the users’ desires with technological feasibility.
In other words, can we realistically create this new product or feature based on the specifications?
The potential solutions you get from design thinking practices lead to wireframes, then to prototypes, and then to finalized products. After users interact with those products, you’d use HCD to determine how the users feel about their interactions.
The feedback you get from HCD methods will allow you to improve the product and, thus, the user’s experience.
Ultimately, design thinking is the approach to use when creating new products or features. You should use HCD when you are creating iterations of the finalized product to enhance the user’s experience.
Agile UX Design & Design Thinking: A Complementary Pair
So, HCD and design thinking complemented each other excellently.
Another iterative process that complements design thinking is agile UX design. But what is agile UX?
Explaining Agile UX Design
Agile UX design blends user experience design with agile product development, allowing teams to create products quickly. So, agile UX breaks down the UX design process into small steps, creating and testing prototypes quickly.
The idea behind agile UX is that designers make improvements gradually, evaluating a potential solution’s performance before making major changes.
How Does Agile UX Relate To Design Thinking?
Design thinking is about defining the parameters of the problem.
Agile UX design is about solving that problem in the most efficient way possible. That’s why agile UX focuses on the hows behind product development and will break the process into smaller units.
So, if the goals of design thinking and agile UX are different, they’ll have different workflows, right?
Indeed, the workflows for both processes differ from one another. With agile UX, you would build first, then test, then learn, and then implement.
Design thinking workflows follow a different pattern – you learn, then you test, which leads to building and implementing. Given that information, you’re probably wondering how agile UX and design thinking fit together.
Well, agile UX design comes with risks, like building on solutions that your users don’t want. Design thinking counteracts these risks because, as you know, the design thinking methodology is great for mitigating risks.
Plus, agile UX doesn’t utilize user feedback during the initial stages of development, which can lengthen the entire design process. Design thinking streamlines the agile development process because it considers users’ feedback right away.
Overall, you should use design thinking and agile UX together to create user-centric products efficiently and quickly.
Lean UX Design & Design Thinking: Another Dynamic Duo
We can’t talk about agile UX without also mentioning Lean UX design.
So, let’s explore how Lean UX design complements design thinking like agile UX does.
What Is Lean UX?
Lean UX is a design approach that values iteration, rapid prototyping, and user feedback.
With Lean UX, there is a great focus on quickly validating assumptions and reducing waste. Overall, Lean UX aims to produce minimum viable products (MVPs) quickly that meet users’ needs.
During the Lean UX process, designers will collect user feedback and research immediately to develop a problem statement.
Problem statement in mind, they will quickly move on to creating and testing ideas to validate their initial hypothesis.
How Does Lean UX and Design Thinking Mix?
Unfortunately, you can’t validate your user-focused hypothesis with Lean UX until you make the prototypes.
With design thinking, you can come up with and validate your initial ideas straight away. Then, you can use Lean UX practices to create prototypes that use minimal resources rapidly.
What’s more, with design thinking, you can improve the communication and collaboration you need for the lean UX process.
Overall, by combining Lean UX with design thinking, you’ll create user-centric products without blowing a hole in your budget. It’s a win-win.
The Steps in the Design Thinking Process
Now, let’s get down to brass tacks.
You need to know the steps in the design thinking process, and that’s exactly what we’ve explored below.
1. Empathize With User Needs
The design thinking process must start with an empathetic understanding of your users’ needs to define the problem statement. So, you’ve got to do your research. Use UX research methods like user interviews and user surveys to acquire valuable quantitative and qualitative data.
Whichever method you use, you must observe and engage with your users, watching how they interact with existing products. This is how you’ll empathize with your users and begin to visualize a potential problem statement.
2. Define the Problem
You’ll now organize the data you gathered in the previous stage to inform your problem statement.
You should pitch your problem statement from the user’s perspective. This will allow your team to think about potential features and functions that will help solve the users’ problems.
3. Ideate Solutions
From your problem statement, you’ll look at the problem from different perspectives to ideate innovative design solutions to said problem. By the end of the ideation stage, you’ll have a series of potential solutions ready to test out.
4. Experiment With Prototypes
Then, you’ll experiment with prototypes you create to find the best possible solution for your problem statement.
By the end of this stage, you’ll have a general idea of how real users will interact with the product.
5. Test Your Prototypes
Lastly, you’ll conduct usability tests on your prototypes with real users. You’ll watch how they interact with the product and gather valuable insights from their feedback.
From those insights, you’ll make the necessary improvements to enhance your product. With each iteration of your product, you’ll conduct more tests with your users.
By the end of this phase, you’ll have an enhanced product that you will go on to finalize and launch.
What Is Design Thinking? Final Thoughts
Design thinking has come a long way since Tim Brown published an article about it in the Harvard Business Review.
It’s similar to how skilled designers and revered brands have come a long way since encountering Page Flows.
Page Flows offers over 5,500 user flow recordings from an endless supply of brands and industries. We specialize in showing our users how to create compelling user journeys and collecting vital user flows like onboarding and upgrading.
Our ethos is simple – don’t reinvent the wheel; learn from it. With our recordings and screenshots, you’ll never find yourself in a design rut again.
What’s more, we collect emails when we record our flows. We do this so our users can learn how to communicate with their users as they experience their products.
So, when your fellow designers ask, “What is design thinking?” you can tell them what you learned from Page Flows.
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