How to provide an excellent user experience for your project? Digital product designers who practice the design thinking approach can help you with this. We will discuss the features of this approach below.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking as a part of product design service helps to thoroughly understand the user, comprehend their problem, and find alternative solutions. It is based on three principles:
- empathy, that is, the ability to walk in the shoes of another person to understand their feelings and emotions;
- breadth of thinking that allows designers to understand the user’s problem in all possible details;
- experiments that determine a designer’s willingness to test their ideas, implement them in practice, and formulate new ones if the previous ones were rejected.
What Projects Can This Concept Be Used For?
Design thinking is suitable for creating human-centric products and services that must be implemented in a non-trivial way, but with maximum intuitiveness. Thus, this method is often used in the development of startups and innovative solutions that do not yet have analogs that have proven their effectiveness in interaction with the end user. If you’re looking for top-notch , web design Sacramento team offers creative solutions to help your business stand out online.
Advantages
Despite the focus on user needs, design thinking is aimed at achieving certain business benefits, namely:
- obtaining loyal customers who received a product that takes into account their desires;
- stimulation of the growth of an innovation culture in the company, due to the development of creative thinking in teams;
- faster time-to-market for viable products;
- avoiding extra expenses through rigorous research and free experimentation in the early stages of product development.
6 Stages of Design Thinking
Now, let’s find out what are the main six stages of product designing based on this method.
Showing empathy for the end user
At this stage, the product design agency analyzes the user experience and the context of the product they work on. To do this, the team conducts in-depth interviews and observes the user’s environment, as well as their habits. Secondary observation takes place through the collection of data about the target audience in open sources (in social networks, the media, and statistical reports).
Focusing on the end user’s problems
This stage of website product design involves processing the information collected in the previous step. The main goal of these actions is to formulate specific questions for further work and optimization and arrange them visually.
Generation of ideas
This is the stage of searching for multiple solutions to the same question. Usually, the implementation of this stage involves brainstorming, that is, a discussion by specialists from different departments of absolutely any, even the most stupid ideas.
Idea selection
At this product designing stage, the best and most viable ideas are selected from the set of ideas (or several ideas that do not contradict each other and can be combined into one).
prototyping
At this stage of product and services design, the team members begin to develop prototypes to test the viability of the chosen idea in practice. These prototypes should be cheap and quick to build so that if an idea doesn’t work, it can be discarded and a new one quickly generated and tested.
Testing
Finally, the prototype, which has been approved by the team, is submitted for testing to focus groups consisting of representatives of the product’s target audience. After that, the team collects user feedback, and with its help, optimizes the prototype.
Final Thoughts
We hope that you now know whether you need to use service and product design in your project and will be able to put it into practice. If you are looking for specialists who will implement it for your product, please, contact us.