User Experience and Design Thinking are concepts that go beyond digital program development. Pretty much everything you interact with on a daily basis has a user experience: your alarm clock, your coffee machine, the map at your subway stop – they all have a user experience and that experience was crafted using design thinking.
To be a UX designer is to understand the holistic picture of an experience while simultaneously paying attention to minute details in the pursuit of identifying and solving problems. Regardless of when and where you apply UX design, to create the best experience for the user you have to understand some key principles of UX design.
1. Design Thinking Overview
UX Design follows the process of design thinking, which is a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human centered design ethos. It’s a creative blend of art, craft, science, and business. Design thinking can be applied to almost anything in life, work, creative projects, even personal relationships.
Empathize: Research and observe the user to understand what they want to achieve and what they need to do so.
Define: Using insights inferred from research, identify the problem the user needs sovled and present it in a problem statement.
Ideate: Generate as many possible solutions to the problem as you can; don’t let constraints limit creativity.
Prototype: Build a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of a product or features within a product.
Test: Share and test the prototypes with users and use feedback to refine the design, revisiting previous steps if necessary.
“The design process is best described metaphorically as a system of spaces rather than a redefined series of orderly steps” Tim Brown, IDEO CEO
All steps are meant to contribute to a project, to create a perpetual loop in which the designers continue to gain new insights, develop innovative solutions, and discover a more profound understanding of the users and the problems they face.
A good exercise to get an overall feel for the design thinking process is the d.school’s Design Thinking Crash Course. Over the course of 90 minutes, two participants are given quick exercises that simulate each step a designer would consider. Real design thinking can last months, even years, so this is just meant to give participants a glimpse into the process.
The ideas I generated to try and solve Josh’s problem
This exercise showed me how much the design thinking process encourages creative thinking and can lead to innovative ideas. I met with my partner Josh, and we discussed aspects of attending Quinnipiac University that frustrated us. He expressed the trouble he had finding parking on campus due to the school’s limited parking lots. After chatting a little more (Josh was kind enough to pull up the campus map and show me all the parking options), I inferred to Josh a way he could reliably plan his commute to campus without having to show up an hour early. The most obvious answer is to build more parking but thinking beyond that I came up with a couple more options. We settled on an app that would either allow students to reserve parking spaces or find an alternative way to campus if there were no spots available.
This was a pretty tame idea and seemed pretty logical, but it was a step in the right direction for me, a person who likes to overthink until I hit a wall and get frustrated. This exercise made me continue thinking of solutions even when I thought I had found the most obvious answer.
2. User Psychology
Psychology is an integral part of the UX design process. Humans are motivated by intrinsic and extrinsic factors. We can be driven to do things depending on external factors like rewards and internal factors like happiness. Understanding the user’s motivations and how their actions can be influenced helps designers understand the user’s problem and what they are designing a solution for.
“A designer who doesn’t understand human psychologies is going to be no more successful than an architect who doesn’t understand physics” Joe Leech, author of Psychology for Designers
Most emotional responses to user design are subconscious, so it can be difficult for users to fully articulate what they need. A useful way to explore the emotions evoked by UX design is through an I Feel / I Need statement:
____ makes me FEEL ____ because my NEED for ____ is or is not being met.
My I Feel / I Need statements for BloodyDisgusting.com
I applied this exercise to FANGORIA, a horror magazine website I read regularly, and their competitor Bloody Disgusting. I found that while I thought the FANGORIA website was simple to almost a fault, it was still an entirely more enjoyable UX experience compared to Bloody Disgusting’s pop-up advertisements and auto play videos.
3. User Empathy
The very first stage of the Design Thinking process is empathy. In a general sense, empathy is our ability to see the world through the eyes of others. In design thinking, empathy is a deep understanding of the problems and realities of the people you are designing for. Empathy is crucial to a human centered design process and helps designers set aside their own assumptions in order to gain better insight. Empathy is gained through research and observation of users in the context of their user experience. The goal is to absorb rather than react.
There are many different methods of research to understand user empathy. The method can be as simple as interviewing someone in their environment or as involved as having researchers inject themselves with prototypical needles to understand patients who require injectable therapy.
Empathy maps are a collaborative visualization used to articulate all of the observed information about a particular type of user. They create a shared understanding of user needs and aid in the design decision process moving forward.
My empathy maps for CEO Steven Foster and employee Jermaine
Using an episode of Undercover Boss, I was able to practice the process of creating an empathy map. I created an empathy map for Lucky Strike Bowling Lanes co-CEO Steven Foster and separate one for one of his many franchise’s employees, Jermaine, based on their interactions and testimonials in the show.
Even with a set list of questions I set out to answer, I found myself rewinding and re-watching the episode a total of 4 times. My research didn’t just end at what each person had to say: there were facial reactions to read, reactions to environment to analyze, and subtexts to unpack. This exercise really demonstrated how closely and carefully a designer must observe the user to fully understand how they feel.
Empathy maps can reveal weakness in initial research or uncover needs the user themselves may not even be aware of. They are a useful tool to help remove bias from deigns and align the team on a single, shared understanding of the user.
4. Comprehensive Personas
When we look out into the world, we process what we experience based on our own contexts and assumptions. However, unless you are designing solely for yourself, you will need to learn how to see the world through the eyes of other people. Easier said than done.
Understanding the user means going beyond basic demographics. There is no way to design with every single person in mind so you must prioritize who you want to focus on by finding patterns in the needs of your users. Once you have figured out these patterns you can begin to build personas, or a fictional representation of a group of users based on the information you have collected and the behaviors you have observed.
Personas anthropomorphize research findings. They give a name and a face to the people you are designing for and enables the designer to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters. Personas aid designers to create different designs for different kinds of people and to design for a specific somebody instead of a generic everybody.
A persona is usually presented as a one-page document that communicates and summarizes research trends and patterns in others. The fundamental understanding of the user should be the focus, not the presentation itself. The aim is to find a “harmonious whole”; personas shouldn’t be too vague but should also be applicable to entire groups of people.
I created a persona for a hypothetical reader of FANGORIA. I focused on someone who would be somewhere outside the magazines main demographic but still interested in the site’s content. I based him on two people in my life who are surrounded by horror fans and have a casual interest in the subject.
As it is with much of this process, there is no right or wrong way to create a persona. The focus isn’t what you create, but rather the information and understand you gain from it.
5. Problem Definition
Once who you’re designing for has been identified and what their needs are, it is time to formulate what the problem is. As the second stage of the design thinking process, the goal of the Define stage is expressing the problem you are attempting to solve in a meaningful and actionable problem statement.
A problem statement is important to any UX design project because it serves as a guide for the team and provides a focus on a user’s specific needs. Your problem statement isn’t about how you’re going to solve the problem but rather what you need to solve. It should create a sense of possibility and optimism, broad enough to encourage creative freedom but narrow enough to make it a manageable task. As always, the user should be the focal point of your statement.
Problem statements can also be expressed in many ways. Point of View statements, user need statements, and How Might We statements all serve to define the user’s problem in an actionable way. POV statements articulate the problem by identifying who the user is, what their needs are, and any insights gathered from the research stage.
I created POV statements based on user reviews of 3 apps I use on a weekly basis (GoPuff, Discord, Yahoo! Sports) using this format:
(User/descriptive) NEEDS (need/verb) BECAUSE (insight/compelling).
This exercise helped me really consider who the users of these apps were and how defining the problem in an actionable way helped generate ideas for a solution. It’s easy to read reviews complaining about poor service and say the solution is to simply improve, but it’s more productive to create statements that inspire creative solutions. With careful attention, you can begin to recognize patterns in user’s pain points and target what the user really needs.
6. Ideation
After a problem has been defined, the next step in the design process is Ideation. The goal of this stage isn’t solving the problem so much as it is the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic, with no attempt to judge or evaluate them. No idea should be deemed too farfetched, the focus should be on improving the user experience, not what can or cannot be done realistically.
Problems are just that, problems. Solving them is going to be difficult and you’re most likely not going to find a solution with your first idea. Ideation methods are meant to encourage creativity, not stifle what could potentially be innovation. There are hundreds of methods that can be used, some able to be done in tandem with others, but it’s important to choose a method that suits the problem you’re attempting to solve. Ideation methods are best practiced using purposeful structure and principles.
One method I tried was an Ideation Mashup. Developed by IDEO, this technique begins by articulating the challenge in a How Might We statement. Taking two categories, one related to the statement and one completely unrelated, you list as many elements as possible for these two experiences in two minutes. The final step is to combine items from the two lists to create as many new products, services, or experiences as you can.
I mashed up elements of working out with elements of professional wrestling
I proposed the statement “How Might We encourage people to work out from home?” and combined the categories of things needed to work out with elements of professional wrestling. I only came up with a few usable solutions, but this was an excellent exercise in thinking outside the box.
Continuing to test ideation methods, I took my app review POV statements and applied 5 different ideation methods to them: Braindump, Worst Possible Idea, The Anti-Problem, Challenge Assumptions, and Provocation. Using two techniques for each statement showed me how certain methods were more suited for certain situations than others and how some methods can be used in tandem.
As you can see, I wasn’t so confident when it came to braindumping
Personally, I found Worst Possible Idea and Provocation the best methods to help me truly think outside the box. As a person who tends to over think things, I recognized that braindumping and challenging assumptions were going to lead me to second guessing myself and limiting what I could really come up with. My ideas needed further development, but what I came up with when I took the pressure of being “right” off myself was definitely a good start.
All UX designers should engage in ideation when facing any design problem, big or small. By avoiding early evaluation, we open our minds to deeper exploration of a problem and ultimately gain more insight. The probability of the first idea we come up with being the best is extremely low, so it’s important to allow ourselves space and time to grow our ideas. Not limiting our ideas can lead to innovation.
7. Journey Maps
Once you and your team have confidently established who your user is and what problem you are setting out to solve, you’ll want to better understand the overall relationship your user has with your organization, brand, service, or product.
Customer data and demographics can only tell a business so much about a user’s experience. Numbers fail to communicate the emotions and pain points a customer feels. There are many methods to explore how the customer feels throughout the process, one of the more impactful being Journey Maps.
A Journey Map tells the story of a user’s experience: from initial awareness, through the process of engagement, and into a long-term relationship. A map can focus on a particular part of the user experience or give a complete overview from start to finish. Every journey map is unique, but they all share similar elements: Personas, a timeline, emotions, touchpoints, and channels. Similar to empathy maps, journey maps help designers see from the user’s perspective.
I created a journey map for a customer buying a new skincare product online for the first time. I documented the difficulty of shopping for skincare online, navigating advertising, researching reviews, and all the stresses brought on by money and performance. For each step of the journey, I tried to come up with at least one suggestion to ease some of the frustration the customer felt during the experience.
Journey maps allow organizations to consider interactions from a user’s point of view and find opportunities for improvement along the way. All organizations have business goals but by using journey maps as a tool in experience strategy, users are always at the forefront of the designer’s decision-making process.
Conclusion
There is a lot that goes into User Experience Design. What I covered here are only the first three steps of the process, but it’s a very valuable process to understand. Understanding who you are designing for is vital in almost anything you set out to create. Deeper understanding and expanded creativity can, and should, be applied to most everything in life.
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