Dream Weavers of UX Design

It is said a Dream is a wish your heart makes!

A beautiful dream is a place where seemingly impossible things happen, and you go with the flow, happily gliding on the experience in your mind space. Some people prefer to stay in this dream phase and try to escape reality. While some people wake up and get working to transform their dreams into reality. UX Designers fall in the latter category.

Does one need to ‘learn’ how to dream??

Well…YES!! At least in the UX Design world, we need to learn how to dream with our eyes & ears open. And like any experience we have with dreams, the dream phase is one of the most delightful ones in the whole design process. But this ideally should not be a solitary process. It can and should be a process where all stakeholders come together and exchange divergent thinking & share out of the box ideas regarding the subject at hand. We need to have a collective dream to bring your UX Design to reality. It is a participatory process where one person has to take on the role of an ‘Interview Guide’ and orchestrate the whole process. Here the conversations should revolve around imagining that ‘sweet spot’ where everything works at peak potential and images that evoke pictures of a promising future.

For this to happen, we first need to pinpoint the product’s positive core, imagine or reimagine and envision its future. In the dream stage of design, you emphasize on the prospect of what is possible. We have to understand the mental models of people, in terms of how they feel, see, act, or react. Think if there are any ways to undo the negative outcome of some situations that may arise.

So if you pave the way to exercise this kind of unbridled and divergent Dream dialogue, all participants will see and appreciate things in a new way.

What kind of people should we involve in this Dream phase?

For this dream phase, various stakeholders, users, and UX designers can be involved as people with different perspectives and POV’s are required to understand the bigger picture. This also helps us dream up a solution that can add value for all involved. You can also have participants who are not related to the product, but who can offer you a holistic point of view on how your product can have a positive impact in terms of making it sustainable and environment friendly.

Tim Brown of IDEO confirms what we already see around us, that we are moving away “from how to get people to consume more”, to “how do we get more meaningful and participative experiences that we can build value from”. Therefore model that will dominate will be a participatory process involving each of us contributing through small creative acts that can produce a greater good. Thus, the discussions can also revolve around finding a win-win goal of making it a better world along with the interests of the organization.

Defining the Dream

This kind of divergent thinking and brainstorming sessions can help us envision many possibilities for the future. Now, this kind of collective dreaming needs to culminate into convergent thinking which leads to the crystallization of the dream. It entails having to chisel out a sharp and clear version of the dream as envisioned by everyone collectively. This will help everyone see the same version of the dream. Therefore these collective thoughts need to be cut & polished like a precious stone for it to shine like a star for everyone to work towards. The projection of a clear picture of the dream vision should be imprinted in the minds of everyone in the design process; so much so, that they can smell, touch, feel, and taste it. They should reach a state where they can visualize the exact common dream in their minds and work in tandem with each other to achieve it. Therefore to attain this kind of desired clarity about the dream vision, asking the following questions and jotting down their answers will help give it concrete shape −

• What overall transformation do you expect in the next one year as per the dream?
• Who are the people you see sharing this dream?
• What positive impact do you see this dream having on each stakeholder?

So the Dream Stage gives your collective vision something more figurative and graphical representation to work towards. Go ahead then, dream on in UX Design, and create fantastic experiences & realities for your users.