Design-led Thinking
User Generated Ideas
Our approach to Design and Development starts with the Users. Identifying their needs and wants helps to produce an authentic and useful solution, which in turn drives effectiveness for the brand.
Listening to your target audience and distilling their requirements, helps create a wish-list of valued features.
This is then married up to a technology solution and benchmarked against the brand objectives; before testing, evaluation and iteration of each element to distil a robust feature, before final inclusion into the development roadmap.
Utilising a Design-Led approach, we put the user at the centre of the process.
It is an approach that involves the application of empathy to problem solving, matching the things people need with technologically feasible and viable solutions available today. Empathy lets us feel what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, to create user-centric products and solutions to meet specific user needs through creativity and innovation.
Its underlying principle is focusing on user needs, aspirations, wishes, concerns and frustrations in attempting to solve their problems. Interestingly, Design Thinking focuses on the most important view from which problem solving should be approached; the users. When problem solving is approached from a user’s point of view, it allows for uncovering novel insights into the product’s user flow thereby finding the right solution to the right problem.
This is an interactive process that focuses on the user’s needs and then works backwards to find a technology solution, which we then test, evaluate and iterate before proceeding to inclusion within the overall development.
The approach is very similar to the Agile Development approach in that it’s iterative. It’s fast moving, in the sense that you adjust your product (and your thinking) rapidly based on feedback from your market. And it is very team oriented; nobody dictates a product’s specs from on high in a design thinking environment.
Firstly, we need to identify the questions we want to answer/ resolve and set the success measurement – What is the ultimate goal?
What problem is our typical user facing, or what goal or desire can we help them achieve?
Then we look to generate ideas.
How We Apply This
Discover
Get insights & better define the problem
Our approach looks initially at Investigating and Collating; What the Goal is, Who the users are, their needs and their wants. This looks to really get under the rug; look for the moments of truth and identify the crisis moments in the users’ experience. The purpose of user research is to discover user patterns and reveal hidden insights. It is the most effective way to find out how people interact with and understand your products as well as highlighting pain points and where users are struggling.
User research gives a true reflection of what is relevant to the user and what they like about using your site? or product, highlighting its usability performance. It is perhaps the most important step in the process as it helps fully understand user views of problem points. Asking the right questions makes user research extremely valuable.
We use a number of different tools to do this, from exit surveys, focus groups, interviews and polls via social media, which help us to gather information directly from the user groups and really understand the nuances of their wants, needs and issues.
Define
Have a clear idea of the scope, goal & delivery
The next step is to move to define the Scope using the insights generated to produce and define the User Personas and set out the project roles. User Stories are carefully generated to match specific persona groups to help us identify requirements and set prioritisation criteria.
Ideate
Developing concepts to bring it to life
Brainstorm workshops are run to generate ideas for new products, content and support features. All ideas should be initially included and will be rationalised in the next step.
Prioritising follows this; creating a set of key elements to include as the MVP. These should clearly match a set of User Personas’ needs and wants, or Desirability, whilst balancing these against Feasibility and Viability.
Create
Create prototypes & concepts
A Unit Development approach allows us to be fully iterative which each section of the Development Roadmap. Producing concept prototypes in In-Vision enables a full User Journey experience which can be used in workshops and focus groups to refine and iterate through mini sprints.
Evaluate
Review, adapt & monitor performance
Invision prototypes will be tested against scripted user scenarios and success criteria determined earlier in the Define process. Iteration of concepts follows until we feel we have a robust concept to include within the website development.