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Over the last few years I’ve been able to define and refine a design process that allows me and teams I’m working along side to take on a problem and produce a solution to solve that problem at the other end. The process that you see above is the ‘full fat’ version, which can be trimmed down to suit team size, time and budget limitations.
In order to really focus on a problem, you first must be able to understand it in intimate detail. This can be achieved by obtaining qualitative data by conducting interviews with both key stakeholders and your current and/or potential end users. These interviews are generally very informal at this point and involves asking as many questions as you can in an attempt to drill down to the very core of the problem. This helps you validate a hypothesis and also uncover additional problems that you might not currently be aware of. My preferred method to understand the problem is to run a workshop called How Might We. This helps to document and prioritise.
Once you have validated and really understood the problem, you can begin to set a long term goal. This goal is a single sentence that defines what you are trying to achieve. This becomes your single source of truth throughout the design process. If any member of the team starts to doubt why and/or what they are working on they can simply refer back to the long term goal to remind themselves.
When the long term goal is defined you and your team need to ask ‘what are all the things that could prevent us from reaching this goal?’ This is best suited as a team exercise with a range of roles from within the business so all the different types of risks can be considered. These questions enable the team to laser focus on their role within the design process by understanding which problems they need to solve in their respective areas in order to create the solution.
Where does the user start and where do they end? Before you can start bringing your solution to life with visuals, you first need to identify all the different user types that will use the solution and map out the journey they will take from discovering your product or feature right through to using it and satisfying the long term goal. The exercise I use for this is called journey mapping. This enables you to set the stage for the next steps in the ideation part of the process.
Inspiration is the spark for every piece of good design. To do this I tend to run a workshop called Lightning Demos that requires team members to go and research how direct and indirect competitors are already solving a similar problem for their users. These can then be cherry picked and put forward as ideas to include in the solution.
Now you know the journey your users are going to take and you’ve hopefully got some good inspiration from other great products, it’s time to start putting together some low-fi visuals on how your UI will look based on the journey that’s been defined. This step which includes the Four Part Sketch workshop, allows you to tell a story and bring to visualise an idea for an experience, no matter how simple or big the idea may be.
Now all the parts of your solution are coming together via your user journey and low-fi visuals, it’s time to think about all the steps you want your users to take through your journey during user testing by creating a User Test Flow. This will help you hit the ground running when developing the prototype for testing.