Design thinking helped Apple successfully reinvent music players with the iPod by deeply understanding users’ unmet needs. It led GE Healthcare to create more patient-centered ultrasound machines through rapid prototyping. When applied effectively, design thinking uncovers surprising insights and innovative solutions.
The design thinking process typically follows five key stages:
Empathize
The first step is to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve from the perspective of the user. Observe users and engage with them to understand their needs, desires, and motivations.
Define
Next, define the core problems you’ve identified based on your user research. Reframe these problems as actionable problem statements to guide idea generation.
Ideate
Brainstorm solutions and generate as many creative ideas as possible. Encourage wild ideas and defer judgement. Build on others’ ideas and go for quantity, as this will lead to many creative solutions that you might skip.
Prototype
Quickly build inexpensive prototypes to visualize potential solutions. Prototypes allow you to gather user feedback early to refine your ideas.
Test
Test your prototypes with real users. Observe how they interact and gather feedback. Use these learnings to redefine problems and make improvements to your solutions.
How to design a user-centered digital product
Next, we’ll cover the key steps for designing a truly user-centric digital product. This includes understanding your users, defining the product vision, designing a mockup, mapping the user journey, prototyping and testing, building and planning for iterations.
Let’s get started!
1. Understand your users and their needs
Designing a successful digital product starts with gaining a deep understanding of your users and what they need. Too often, products are designed based on assumptions rather than actual user insights.
There are several effective methods for user research:
- User interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with potential users to understand their motivations and challenges. Ask open-ended questions and listen attentively to identify their needs.
- Surveys: Gather quantitative data on user preferences and opinions by conducting online surveys. While less personal than interviews, surveys can reach a broader target audience.
- User testing: Observe how actual users interact with your product or prototype. Take note of where they struggle and what confuses them. User testing reveals usability issues and opportunities that can be addressed to improve the overall user experience.
- Analytics review: Study usage metrics if your product already exists. See which features are used or abandoned.
- Empathy maps: Visualize user thoughts, actions, motivations, and concerns. Empathy mapping builds understanding and user-focused thinking.
- User personas: Create fictional user archetypes based on research. A well-defined user persona with goals and behaviors helps guide design decisions.
You should also aim to continuously engage with real users throughout the design process. Their feedback will help you create a product that truly meets user needs.
2. Define the product vision and goals
Defining a clear product vision and goals early in the design process provides a north star to guide the project and keep it aligned.
The beauty of design thinking is that it helps you design digital products that keep users’ needs in mind. Since you now already understand your users and have an empathetic feeling for their needs, you can reframe the problem you are trying to solve in a human-centered way.
To develop an effective human-centered product vision statement:
- Define the target users and their key needs the product will address
- Articulate the unique value proposition — how it’ll improve users’ lives
- Specify the desired emotional impact — how users should feel when using it
- Describe the defining attributes — what makes it stand out from competitors
- Include inspirational language — create excitement and buy-in
The vision should be clear, concise, and inspire the team.
Complement this with a set of SMART goals specifying desired outcomes for users and the business. This creates measurable targets to evaluate success.
With a compelling vision and strategic goals defined upfront, you have a framework to guide design decisions and know when you’ve succeeded. This focuses efforts and sets the stage for an effective user-centered design process.
3. Map the user journey
User journey mapping involves illustrating the steps users take to accomplish crucial tasks and achieve their objectives with your product.
Thoroughly mapping and visualizing the journey from the user’s perspective results in a product that smoothly guides users to success.
Some effective ways to map the journey include:
Create user flows
These diagrams illustrate each step users take to complete key tasks, from start to finish. Identify the trigger that prompts the user to begin, the happy path steps, any branches or alternate paths, and the goal or desired outcome.
Develop storyboards
Storyboards visually depict a typical user scenario with a series of screens that represent key interactions. Include annotations to explain the purpose and action on each screen. Storyboards bring the user experience to life.
Outline user stories
Write out narratives from the user’s perspective. For example: “As a user, I want to be able to save products to a wishlist so I can purchase them later.”
Focus on the user’s motivation and goal.
Map emotions
Note the emotions users may feel during different stages, like confusion, delight, frustration. This highlights pain points to address.
4. Design mockups
Translate your solutions into low-cost mockups that you can experiment with. These mockups allow you to gather user feedback early and often. Start with low-fidelity mockups like paper prototypes and wireframes, then iterate toward higher-fidelity digital prototypes.
Designing can be a real challenge, especially if you’re not a design guru. It often involves jumping between different software, struggling to find the right tools, and spending hours on end just to get a basic mockup up and running. However, with the right tool you can create stellar mockups in under 30 minutes.
With Visily, you can quickly create amazing designs, wireframes, mockups, and prototypes using screenshots, sketches, and templates. It’s a one-stop-shop for all your design needs, and it’s specifically designed to help non-designers like you save time and effort.
