The misconception — especially in this part of the world where UI/UX is just gaining prominence, that the scope of UI/UX design is limited to producing visually pleasing designs, calls for a reorientation.
A lot of UI/UX newcomers are quick to master design tools and push pixels in a bid to join in the latest design trends and produce artistic UI’s with beautiful animations. They often forget that Design is not an artifact.
This isn’t to discredit the need to develop visual UI design skills, but there’s more to play here.
UI designs, in themselves, are just permutations behind the overall goal of design — which is a systematic approach to solving problems. Failing to meet this goal often leaves Junior designers with elegant UI’s that lack functionality.
Good design is becoming standard — as seen in the availability of numerous platforms for design templates. The demand for UI/UX designers is heading towards their ability to solve human-centered problems, taking into consideration business requirements, design principles and technology when designing.
Yes, a UI/UX designer is expected to solve user problems and accelerate business objectives while producing aesthetically pleasing UI’s of course.
“We designers don’t get hired to make pretty things or win design awards. We get hired to solve business problems.”
— James Bradley
DESIGN THINKING
The design methodology that provides a solution-based, human-centric approach to solving problems is called DESIGN THINKING. Here, you identify the most pressing needs of users and adopt a solution aimed at creating delightful user-experiences with products.
Design thinking methods can be applied to solve complex problems that occur around us — in our relationships, countries and the world as a whole. It is not limited to providing digital solutions.
The five stages of Design Thinking are as follows:
Empathize
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to walk in the user’s shoes in order to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.
Empathy is the foundation of human-centered design process, it allows design thinkers set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs. Here, you observe, engage and immerse yourself in the physical environment of the users to understand their experiences and motivations and gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved.
DEFINE
After empathizing, Design thinkers must clearly define the problems users are facing by putting together the information gathered during the empathizing stage — What are you looking to solve? Is this problem worth solving?
The Problem statements ought to be specific and user-centric. Note that you must engage users before defining the core challenges you are addressing.
IDEATE
With clearly defined problem statements, design thinking transits to ideations. When you ideate, you “think outside the box” to generate solutions to the discovered challenges.
This comes in two phases:
Divergent thinking — where brainstorming sessions are used to stimulate free thinking, explore the problem space and come up with lots of potential solutions;
Convergent thinking — where designers start to sift through the ideas to hone in on the best solution.
Rushing the divergent stage often results in ignoring more novel approaches in favor of more obvious solutions.
PROTOTYPE
Prototypes are simulations or scaled down versions of a product or specific features within a proposed solution (digital product). This is used for testing, prior to launch. It is an excellent way to build on the efforts of ideation where you get ideas and explorations out of the mind, into the physical world.
This is an experimental phase which allows you physically use the product and work out whether it functions as expected. By the end of this stage, the design team will have a better idea of the key flaws within the operation of the product which could have resulted in serious consequences, and have a clearer view of how real users would behave, think, and feel when interacting with the end product.
It doesn’t always have to end in finding something “wrong” either, you may find a unexpected benefit or use for the product, which you never expected.
TEST
Testing gives design teams the ability to inform their designs with reality.
Basically, a short session is conducted to observe how users interact with the product. The users should be encouraged to speak out loud while performing specific tasks on the product. It is very important to know what they are thinking, what they are expecting, is there something surprising, something weird, something good.
The moderator of the session identifies the pain points of the users and with the feedback gotten, the design team decides which issues to resolve, and improvements are made.
You will also learn what your users really love about the product, and which features they find very easy to use. Those aspects should be preserved and maybe even used as selling points down the road.
Conclusion
We may have listed a sequential flow of the design thinking process but it is important to note that it should not be subjected to being carried out in a linear fashion. Design thinking is an iterative process, more than one stage may be conducted concurrently, it doesn’t have to be conducted in a specific order.
The biggest design challenges lies not in the actual implementation of a design solution, but rather with identifying the correct problem to solve.
