App Design Thinking Process (5 Steps)
As the CEO of an App Development Company, I have seen and been a part of the conceptualized-design-development process and often seen the groundwork laid to create a successful digital product. This is a framework we live by when helping entrepreneurs build their digital products — It works, and here's why.
App Design Thinking Process gives a human-centered solution-based approach to identifying and solving problems. It’s the process of ideating and validating your concept whilst building it to the highest standard using a process that keeps everything watertight.
Understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways. By creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing you will intern build a product that is solving a real problem and desirable.
It’s very important to understand a good UX (user experience).
1. Empathise
Gaining an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations.
It’s important to immerse yourself in the physical environment to have a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved. Don’t follow your own assumptions, find out what other people think about your problem.
2. Define (the Problem)
Using the information you have created and gathered during the Empathise stage. You will analyse your observations and synthesise them. This is to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point. You should seek to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centered manner.
This is one of the most important steps for creating a solid foundation for building your business. It should include a lean canvas approach as well as your defining your product, elements, functionalities, and properties.
This is an example of a Wire-flow for Now Dating.
3. Ideate
Now you’re ready to expand on your concept. You’ve grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, and you’ve analysed and synthesised your observations in the Define stage. This will give you clear human-centered problem statement to visualize and work from.
Yourself and your team members can start to ‘think outside the box’ to identify new solutions to the problem statement you’ve created, and you can start to look for alternative ways of viewing the problem.
There are hundreds of Ideation techniques such as Brainstorm, Brainwrite — Don’t be afraid to put it all on the table.
4. Prototype
The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of your product or specific features found within the product. Keep it simple so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage.
Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team. This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems that were identified during the first three stages.
The solutions are implemented within the prototypes and, one-by-one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined or rejected on the basis of the users’ experiences.
Once you have functional prototypes it’s time for the app development.
5. Test
This is where you want to test your problem/solution product on the market — Either with a static prototype or an MVP functional app with minimum features.
You will use tools like product hunt, facebook groups, and testing platforms to test your concept at mass.
You will also find some great design inspiration on dribbble for those starting out.
We hope this helped you in your mission to create your first app. Remember to get in touch with us for a free strategy session — We help many entrepreneurs every month.
