Implementing a Design Process that Combines New Solutions with Proven Methods

The process of designing a product is crucial to its success, but it is often carried out separately from the standard development life cycle. Usually, an engineering team is not involved in this process and only receives the finished design to implement. This creates a false sense of saving time because the engineering team is not interrupted and can concentrate on coding.

At the same time, engineers lose a very important thing – context. As they did not participate in the process, they don’t understand why things are as they are. Beyond causing misunderstandings and misconceptions, it can also limit the engineers’ ability to propose alternative solutions. That’s why you need to ensure that regardless of the development framework you choose, there is a space for the design process. It doesn’t mean that the whole team needs to participate in the design phase – allocating one to two engineers to design sessions will do.

Read on to learn more about the three most common design process approaches.

Design thinking

By now, most executives have at least heard about design thinking methods – ethnographic research, an emphasis on reframing problems and experimentation, the use of diverse teams. Their strength lies in focusing on customer needs and challenging assumptions. The weakness of the ideation process in most companies is that it usually has only two stages: ideation and development – in other words, it starts with an idea and then goes straight to execution. In design thinking, first you try to properly define a problem you want to solve, then ideate to finally test your idea and assumptions.

A design thinking process usually consist of five stages:

Step 1: Empathize with end users

Empathy is the ability to see the world through other people’s eyes – to see what they see, feel what they feel and experience things as they do. In the design thinking process, the first step is for a designer to empathize with the end user by closely observing the problem. During this stage, a designer interviews the individuals and communities affected, while also framing any insights that emerge from their observations. Building empathy with end users is about listening to people with an open and unbiased mindset.

Typical techniques you can use here include:

Storyboarding the experience – Create a series of sketches that explain, step-by-step, the customer experience from a customer’s point of view, as if it were shot as a movie sequence.

Customer journey mapping – Visualize the process that a person goes through to accomplish a goal.

Card sorting – Use a research method in which study participants sort individually labeled cards into groups according to criteria that make the most sense to them.

What/How/Why – Start with observations (what), then move to higher abstractions (how), until you arrive at the emotional drivers behind behaviors (why).

Competitor research – Research major competitors in the industry and use this analysis to gain insights into their products, sales and marketing tactics.

Data gathering – Try to gather as much quantitative and qualitative data as possible, including internal data and external sources like information on the internet, forums and social media.

Contextual interviews – Conduct one-on-one interviews to learn more about the needs, desires and goals of the people you’re designing for.

Surveys – Measure and categorize attitudes or collect self-reported data that can help track or discover important issues to address.

Job shadowing (field studies) – Participate in and observe a customer’s typical workday.

Five “Whys” – Dig deeper and deeper into a problem with every ‘why’ until you arrive at the root cause of an occurrence.

Participatory design – Give participants design elements or creative materials to construct their ideal experience in a concrete way that expresses what matters to them the most.

User persona – Create a fictional character that represents a typical user of a product or service, based on research and data about the target audience, which includes demographics, behaviors and goals. A user persona provides a complete view of the user, including their motivations, pain points and preferred methods of interacting with a product.

Do not rely on just one of these tools. Try to select at least three to have a broader view of your end user.

Step 2: Define

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to define your customer’s problem.

Usually done by defining one or more problem statements, it’s always presented from a customer’s point of view, addresses a real issue (not assumption based) and includes reasons for that problem.

Well-defined problem statement: “Our customers frequently abandon their shopping carts during the check-out process due to the complexity and length of the process, leading to missed sales opportunities for our ecommerce platform.”

Poorly defined problem statement: “Our ecommerce site has issues during check-out.”

A well-defined problem statement should be specific, contextualized and quantify the impact, thereby offering clear direction for problem-solving. In contrast, the poor example is ineffective as it lacks clarity and fails to provide adequate information to guide the design process.

Step 3: Ideate

Once problems are defined, you can start thinking about potential solutions. Ideation processes can vary widely – from how many people are involved to the techniques used. It’s essential that the ideas generated by a team are reflective of their nature, needs and experience with ideation. Some recommended techniques at this stage include:

Brainstorming – Build good ideas from each other’s wild ideas.

Braindumping – Like brainstorming but done individually.

Brainwriting – Like brainstorming, but everyone writes down ideas and passes them to others to add to before discussing them.

Brainwalking – Like brainwriting, but members walk around a room and add to others’ ideas.

Worst possible idea – Use inverted brainstorming to encourage reserved individuals to share bad ideas, which can produce valuable concepts.

Mindmapping – Use this graphical technique to connect ideas to major and minor problems.

Sketching/Sketch storming – Utilize rough sketches and diagrams to convey your ideas and explore potential solutions, which enables you to delve into the design space more thoroughly.

Storyboarding – Develop a visual problem/design/solution-related story to illustrate a situation’s dynamics.

SCAMPER method – Encourage individuals to think differently and generate innovative solutions. Each letter in the acronym stands for a different aspect of the technique: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse.

Step 4: Prototype

Now it’s time to build something you can use to test your solution. It shouldn’t be a fully working solution. Mockups or even paper prototypes (paper representation of a digital product done by using sheets of paper, glue and pens) will do the trick.

Step 5: Test

Testing is a crucial step in design thinking as it enables a team to gather feedback and insights from users before finalizing a product. By testing a prototype, designers can identify potential usability issues and areas for improvement. Testing should start as early as possible to incorporate user needs at the early stages of concept development.

Conducted through various methods, testing includes user interviews, usability testing sessions, surveys and observational studies. These methods enable teams to observe how users interact with a prototype, understand their behaviors and preferences and gather qualitative and quantitative data to inform design decisions. Testing is a process based on iterations, meaning that designers gather feedback, make adjustments and test again to continually improve a product.

Design sprint

Sprint or design sprint (not to be confused with SCRUM sprints) is an approach designed by Google Ventures for startups in their portfolio to help with the ideation process. It’s an interesting take on the design thinking approach that is well defined and time framed. It’s a great starting point for teams that don’t have a lot of experience with modern design processes. Five days of collaborative workshops look like this:

Day 0 (Prepare) – Before the design sprint starts, identify the objective by choosing a “big” problem your company needs to solve

Day 1 (Map) – Define the problem (empathize and define)

Day 2 (Sketch) – Participants come up with solutions to the defined problem (ideate)

Day 3 (Decide) – Decide on the best approach and refine it (ideate)

Day 4 (Prototype) – Create a working prototype

Day 5 (Test) – Test the prototype

While this workshop approach is straightforward, the key factor is to select the right participants, usually a group of seven people or fewer. You’d need at least one person who has authority to approve the designed approach, a financial expert, business experts (marketing, a customer), a design expert and technology expert (who will be able to build the prototype). As you can see, gathering only your engineering team will not do the trick – including one of your customers is a strong advantage.

Event storming

Event storming is the least well-known design process technique listed here, but it comes with some unique strengths that other approaches lack. It’s especially useful when your product is related to a complex business process, as it helps you to understand the big picture, identify potential problems with the process and is also compatible with domain-driven design. For more details, check out an article about building and maintaining an effective software development team.

Designing customer-centric solutions

By including UX & UI designers, business experts and software engineers in the design process, product development teams can create solutions that are not only technologically advanced, but also user-friendly and intuitive. Steps like prototyping or testing shouldn’t be omitted to save time – they’re essential stages for building digital products that address customer needs. As outlined in this article, there are numerous techniques and methods that can be applied to a design process. An experienced cross-functional development team will be able to choose the right tools and methods to get the best results for a given product.

Want to learn more best practices for delivering high-quality solutions? Download The Modern Approach to Product Development, a comprehensive guide that provides an in-depth breakdown of the development process as well as practical examples that illustrate how to apply these ideas in practice.