Design Thinking

A successful and meaningful idea

You need to consider three aspects if you want your idea to be meaningful and successful: Feasibility, Desirability and Viability. The solution needs to improve people's life in some manner, but at the same time it needs to be feasible and make business sense.

Phases of design thinking process

The design thinking process has five steps, which empathize and answer questions like: Who you are designing for? What their needs are? This process wants to solve the problem from the customer's point of view. Building a solution from each other's ideas inside the team. This will allow you to provide solutions from different point of views while taking into account different disciplines.

Incorporate human behavior into design

The end goal for the design thinking process is that the solution leads to innovation, putting empathy and collaboration as the main focus for the final solution. ABC Nighttime made a great segment about IDEO's design thinking process for when they needed to re-design a shopping cart. It is really worth a watch.

Technology and liberal arts

Stanford University was one of the pioneers when it comes to promoting the design thinking program: a design process focus in the human approach to tackle problems through design. Steve Jobs was a big advocate for this process and the mix of technology and liberal arts for all Apple products.

IDEO

We cannot talk about design thinking without talking about Dave Kelley from IDEO. Dave Kelley worked closely with Steve Jobs. He was the one who designed the computer mouse for Apple among some other revolutionary products. There is a great video where you can see Dave Kelly and IDEO in action.

Workshops

Workshops is a plugin for Figma that allows you to create and add post-it notes. It even comes with a countdown timer that will help you manage the time your team will spend working on the design process.

Prioritization matrix UX Design exercises

Part of the design thinking process is to classify the ideas we are proposing as solutions between feasibility and importance. We will use a prioritization matrix to filter our ideas. For this, we will use the workshops plugin in Figma. The Nielsen Norman Group has a great article about it.

The advantage of using Figma for these kind of exercises is that you can work together with your colleagues in real-time. The first thing we will do is create a matrix of two by two. Press P on your keyboard and draw a vertical line with a height of 800px, and a width of 5px. Then, we will copy this line twice.

Now, let's grab one of the lines and change its angle to 90 degrees, this allows us to change it from vertical to horizontal. Copy that horizontal line and let's build the matrix while making sure that we are aligning the lines horizontally as well as vertically.

Then, create a frame of 2000 * 1200 and place the matrix there. Select the two lines that form the cross and change the color to #B1B1B1. In Stroke setting, set these to a dashed line.

Next, add two triangles to the edges of the lines. Also, add some text to each one of the quadrants in the following order: top left and bottom right quadrants to MAYBE, the bottom left to NO and the top right to YES. Then, we will style the matrix so it can have more subtle colors. Feel free to add your own style, or download our Figma file. Finally, group all the assets and lock them.

Now, right-click on the canvas. Go to plugins and select the Workshops plugin. You will see that a small new window will pop-up, from here we can select a post-it.

Now we can start adding some post-its to our matrix. There is no recipe or formula to filter which ideas belong to which quadrants. There are no bad ideas when you are brainstorming; most of the good ideas come from wild thoughts. But as designers, we need to consider the context of our end-users, the context of the client, and our team's context. And that will give us the lights to find the most feasible solution for the team, which at the same time will be the most important to the user.

Conclusion

Every product goes through a thinking process, which is the representation of a mix of different ideas. We need to learn to work smart and efficiently and grab all the information we can to speed up our design process. Design thinking can help us create a product from different experiences, backgrounds, and ideas in a short amount of period.