With Design Thinking to a Product Customers Love
To make awesome products, Design Thinking is one of the greatest methods to use. It is an iterative process that focuses mainly on the problem you want to solve rather than the solution. In the following article, I will show you how the whole process works best with a real-life example of a redesign of an online portal for banking customers. I’ll take you through the process, let’s go. Oh, and if you want to see in advance what we’re on about, take a look at the table of contents:
- Design Space Exploration
- Critical Function Prototyping
- Dark Horse Prototyping
- Funky Prototyping
- Functional Prototyping
- X-is finished Prototype
- Final Prototype
The Design Brief is the beginning of every Design Thinking Challenge. It contains background as well as key information about the Design Project. For our real-life example about the banking portal, that was the Design Brief:
Design Brief
“The online portal in place now, the company focused on technical functionalities rather than customer’s needs. As a result, customer satisfaction suffers. The Design Thinking Challenge therefore focuses on the design, relevant functionalities as well as usability and make customers love them.”
The assignment is clear, so let’s dive into the process.
Design Space Exploration
The name tells a lot about the things to be done in this step. In the Design Space Exploration, we get to know our customers with their specific needs. The one main task is:
Interview, Interview, and once again: Interview your prospects!
Asking questions is important in an interview, yes. But even more important is getting to know your customer's stories. Let them talk and ask the most open questions about the topic you can think of. Interviewing potential customers for the banking solution, we’ve asked questions like the following:
- What is important to you when speaking to your insurance about your matters?
- What are your best experiences with a company in regards to communication?
- What are your worst experiences with a company in regards to communication?
With these questions, you get the stories you need! People love to talk about themselves so you just need to create the right environment with such questions and voila!
Personas and User Journey’s
You might already spot similarities between the interview — so you know, you’re doing a good job! I bet you created a fictional persona in your mind — representing all customers you’ve interviewed? Congratulations, you’ve created the first persona! This Persona might use your solution in the future and of course, you can have more than just one of them.
Write down all the important information you need about your persona. For the banking portal, it was important to know the daily tasks as well as things like motivation and specific needs. Check Image 1 to get an example of a persona. Information needed changes from product to product.
So now you know your persona. With the persona, the User Journey comes with it. As the name says itself, you create the journey of your persona while using the product. For example, the start of the journey could be the purchase of the product and the end would be when the customer decides to go with the competition.
Emotional state is key for a valuable User Journey
Make sure you get to put the emotional state of the persona into the user journey. This is the most important insight and also the reason why we use User Journeys. Questions that tell something about the emotional state are like:
- In which step is the persona happy?
- Where does the persona get angry?
You need to know this when designing your product and, more important, resolve the parts where your persona is not happy or even angry. Find an example of a User Journey in Image 2.
If you need further information on User Journey Mapping, check out this blogpost from Nielsen Norman Group.
Free Resources
To give you a kickstart with creating amazing Personas as well as User Journeys, I’d like to share with you the templates I’ve created. Just use the link below to go to my designs in Canva:
Templates to Create AWESOME Personas and User Journeys
Let Albert Einstein express some last words about the first phase:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
And this is more than “Just important” — Interview, Interview, Interview.
Critical Function Prototyping
You know your persona and their user journey now, great! Problem Interviews are sometimes not easy to master, especially when you count on the shy people among us. Also, the right questions are also not always easy to find!
From the problem space, we wander to the next space, where we gonna explore the functionalities that your persona needs to have. SO Let’s PROTOTYPE!
Get some Post-Its, carton, pens and pencils, and start prototyping!
The good ideas come when you are crazy and creative with physical material!
Post — It Prototype
Cardboard with some post-its on it is already enough to go on to the street and start testing. That’s how we’ve done it for the banking prototype. The people that had to test the prototype simply needed to put the most important functionalities like “Ordering payment slip”, on top and then descending from its priority.
At the end of this stage, we know what our Persona needs to have in our product. The next step is going to be funny, let’s go on!
Dark Horse Prototyping
I promised, the Dark Horse Prototyping will be funny, and here is why: Within this phase, we use a different kind of reframing techniques. They are great because with their help you can break out of thinking patterns about the product, the problem space, or anything in regards to the design process.
Let me introduce the techniques we’ve used:
- Anti — Dote: Think of a hypothesis that you have and then reframe it, that it means exactly the opposite.
Example:
Hypothesis: The user needs to have a clear overview of the portal about all the different functionalities.
Anti — Dote: The portal has to be messy, that the user has to search for the right functionalities as long as possible. - How Might We?: Simple as that, just finish the sentence, but don’t look for a solution yet, just pose the question.
“How might we help the customers of the bank to save money for a specific goal?” - Figuring Storming: To take on different views, imagine what Lionel Messi or Barack Obama would say to your design challenge.
“What would Lionel Messi as a customer do to use the banking portal most effectively?”
If these reframing techniques didn’t convince you, check out the following blog posts for more inspiration:
After brainstorming new ideas — Don’t forget to go out and test them again with real-life customers. Keep in mind that your targeted test users are the ones that fit into the persona that we’ve created during Design Space Exploration.
If you design something that only you are engaged with and not your potential customers, you’re designing for the wrong person!
Funky, Functional & X-is finished Prototyping
We start to approach the end of the process. The first time during all those steps, we put together all ideas into one prototype. Until now, we’ve only created one prototype per idea.
Mockup of the Portal
Putting together all the evaluated needs, we got a complete overview of all functionalities on the right-hand side. With this solution, of course, we went out again to test this idea!
Final Prototype
The last feedbacks from user testing are implemented. We’re now focusing much more on the design than on the functionalities. Creating a clickable prototype, that potential customers love and would like to use was the best way to get one last, valuable round of feedback!
Adobe XD is brilliant to create clickable prototypes!
There are many different tools you can use in order to create your clickable prototype if you have a digital product that you would like to test. As mentioned above, we’ve used Adobe XD and were more than satisfied with it.
And this is it, our FINAL PROTOTYPE:
Sorry for the non-English native screenshot, but the banking project was in Switzerland, so German was the language to create content. However, it is more important to see the design difference between the Funky and the Final Prototype in regards to the design.
Retro At The End Of The Process
Design Thinking is a great way to design amazing products, as you work so closely with the potential customer together, that it is almost impossible to miss something. However, as the process seems a bit time-consuming, try only just implementing little parts into your daily life and you will already realize small and effective changes.
I’m always curious about different techniques, methods, and point of views. A Big “Thank You” already in advance for your support in sharing this post with your network.
