Design Thinking Basic Checklist

We all have been there. The problem and frustration start to appear after we designing the project for a period of time and you don’t know how to continue. This situation is fairly normal because of the change on the project, the uncertainty on the background or the mixed directions on the design thinking.

When it happens, we can restart from the basic, and to consider from few perspectives to clarify our thoughts. Here’s a simple but useful checklist for you to reconsider your project once you are running into problems, you will know where to focus on.

Starting from Scratch

When we are in the stage of early beginning of project, we have to focus on figuring out what problem we are solving. We always say that a good design requires tremendous amount of effort, that’s why we need to make sure the direction is on the right track before we moving on to design details.

Before we start, we can ask ourself this question:

“Is this the problem worth to dealing with?”

1. How many people are facing this problem?
2. How often does this problem happen?
3. Which part is this problems located in overall map, does it make impact on the core use scenario and flow?
4. Do you have enough resources to solve this problem at present stage?

Building Persona

A good design must be purposeful, if you are trying to make something that serving everyone, you will end up making something messy and compromising. To create a good persona can help designer to focus on users they are targeting, to see from their vision, and to discover problems they are facing with.

1. Can the interviewer represent the opinion for high proportion of target audience?
2. Does the question equip with objectivity, without misleading the judgement of interviewer?
3. Does the question deep enough for us to chase down real problems that target audiences are facing with?

Defining Technique and Purpose

Don’t bury yourself in studying technique at the early stage, because there are so many ways to do so. But first we have to make sure what’s the purpose we are heading. To understand the difference between technique and purpose, technique is the solution we consider based on the purpose we want to achieve. Purpose is the direction we look up to and something don’t change very often. Technique is the strategy we come up with and something can be improvise.

1. Does your design provide enough useful information for user to take the action?
2. Does your design aim to help user to achieve a certain purpose?
3. Does this problem have a better solution require less resources?

Exploring Reference

A good reference research contains a lot of knowledge as well, the thing is, there are so many good design out there, but not anyone of them is suitable for the project you are working on. When we are facing with so many options, we can make a preliminary judgment to see which ones are worth referring.

1. Does this reference and the project you working on hold certain commonness?
2. What’s the core concept of this reference about? Does it express completely?
3. Does this reference have the sense of innovativeness that encouraging you to think outside the box?

Designing the Big Map

There’s no ending for design journey, we need to keep thinking and updating. Every moment we will be facing with different background and resource, which requiring us to make the reasonable decision flexibly. The most important thing is to always remain the capacity for independent thinking, and the capacity for looking into bigger picture.

1. Have you design the complete blueprint for future development?
2. Does the current design proposal is being discussed and agreed by whole team?
3. Does the core flow is making sense? Does every edge-case have been considered?

Collecting Feedback

Collecting feedbacks is making crucial impact on pushing design solutions forward, a healthy way to collect feedback is to test the feedback with small sample at first, than to push to more users gradually, in order to avoid negative influence at all forces.

1. Is there another channel to reach out to the real feedback?
2. Is this feedback reflecting the opinion from most people, or just one person opinion?
3. Is this feedback worth solving in current stage, or it will be better to replace it in the future with more comprehensive plan?

Design is a continues journey, we need to always keep in mind what and who are we designing for, and to find the best solution along the way. This design thinking checklist can’t guarantee you a stunning design work, but it does help you to clear your mind and find the purpose of this design should be.