Design thinking is only for design or user interfaces? Not so, says Petya Grady, Director of UX at Lokion. Join Petya in this installment of Ask the Expert as she shares just how our UX strategy team makes design thinking principles work for internal use and solving challenges beyond design.
One of the biggest misconceptions about design thinking is that it's only useful for solving design challenges, or challenges related to user interfaces. In reality, design thinking can be applied to a wide range of problems, from product development to marketing to employee engagement. Recently, our User Experience (UX) Strategy team went through a structured problem-solving session on how to better serve internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, we used the very same principles we apply when designing an application or rebuilding an ecommerce website. Here’s how you can do it too.
1. Define Your Problem
The first step in the design thinking process is to clearly define the problem you're trying to solve. This means taking a step back and examining the challenge from the perspective of your user or customer. In our case, we opened up a Miro board and listed all the stakeholder groups we serve, both internal and external. Then we outlined the particular needs, wants, and expectations of each group. We then ran a quick voting exercise that allowed us to identify which of the listed needs seemed to be causing the most heartache for our team. In this case, we identified requirements gathering and documentation as our leading problem area.
2. Ideate through Divergent Thinking
Once you have a clear understanding of the problem to solve, it's time to brainstorm and come up with as many ideas as possible. The key here is to encourage divergent thinking and to avoid judgment of ideas. The team worked “alone together” as each of us documented a number of ideas on how to improve our process and deliverables around requirements gathering.
We ended up with a list of 32 ideas, ranging from building out our internal user interface (UI) pattern libraries, to getting additional training on presentation and communication, to pushing for deeper collaboration with our clients’ management and engineering teams.
3. Prototype to Bring Ideas to Life
Once you have a list of potential solutions, it's time to start prototyping. This is where you start to bring your ideas to life and test them with real users. The goal here is to figure out a way to quickly test and iterate on your ideas in order to continue building momentum.
In our case, we knew that even though we had many great ideas, some of them would be harder to implement since they required deeper alignment across teams and stakeholders. We identified ideas on our list that are within the autonomous scope of our team and picked a small number of ideas to test out.
The key here is to fight the temptation to do everything at once. Among other things, we chose to experiment with some of our client presentation formats in order to better document project goals and deliverables.
4. Test Your Prototype
Once you have a prototype, it's time to test it with your users. Get feedback on your solution and iterate based on that feedback. You may find that your initial solution isn't quite right, but that's okay. The goal here is to test and iterate until you arrive at a solution that meets your users' needs. As an agency we have the luxury of working with multiple clients at a time, which gives us plenty of opportunities to test our new ideas and get real feedback. We do so fearlessly and embrace the opportunity to learn and adjust.
The Design Thinking Mindset
Design thinking is more than a process, more than just a collection of sticky notes and sets of exercises. It is instead a way of thinking, an embrace of experimentation, playfulness, and innovation.
Encourage team members to come up with new ideas and test them with users. Celebrate failures and learn from them. Create a safe space for your team to take risks and to try new things. By embracing design thinking principles and fostering a culture of innovation, your organization can become more agile and better equipped to tackle whatever challenges come your way.
Petya Grady, Director of User Experience, Bio
Petya Grady is the Director of User Experience (UX) Strategy at Lokion. Previously a Sr. UX Strategist, Petya is responsible for a wide range of Lokion’s services portfolio and managing the UX strategy team. Petya is also a co-founder of CodeCrew, a non-profit dedicated to offering high-quality computer science education to underrepresented youth.
