Design Thinking at Voices
At Voices, our users are at the center of every decision, and this is particularly true for the product design team. Our job as designers is to make sure that the designs we create are able to solve our user’s problems and meet business objectives, while being easy to use and following best practices. We’ve built our users — both internal and external — into our design process through Design Thinking. We use the Design Thinking process to help us better understand and empathize with the people we are designing for. Design thinking has helped us foster collaboration within our teams, empathize company wide with our users, and create artifacts that we can refer back to.
This chart from NN/g visualizes the design thinking process as a cycle.
So, What’s Design Thinking?
Nielsen Norman Group outlines design thinking as ‘an ideology supported by an accompanying process’. The design thinking ideology seeks to solve problems in a user-centered way. It is a method of creative problem solving that aims to better understand the user and their problems. The goal is to understand who we are designing for, their needs, then try to solve their problems. The design thinking process are the steps we take to bring the ideology to life.
The design thinking process is iterative, typically involving multiple phases. NN/g has defined 6 phases to the design thinking process which are; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test & Implement. Although there are 6 phases labelled by NN/g, every company will adapt their own variation that works for them. These phases are used to guide us through the problem from our user’s perspective, and gather their feedback along the way. Within each step there are various activities we use, and during each step we create artifacts that we can refer back to.
It’s important to note that the design thinking process is non-linear and phases don’t always need to be sequential. This process offers the flexibility to move through the phases as needed. When new insights are uncovered, we are able to revert to the previous phases to make adjustments.
What does Design Thinking look like at Voices?
For Voices, we have paired design thinking with another methodology called the D Process. The D process is our methodology for taking a customer/market problem or opportunity and turning it into a solution that is developed and deployed. “D” represents the first letter of each phase of the process; Discover, Define, Design, Development and Deploy. Our whole product department uses the D process and the responsibilities within each phase vary by role.
Discover
The Discover phase is used to uncover potential problems, identify opportunities for improvement and gather insights from our users. We’ve created ongoing feedback loops so that we are able to hear directly from our users. We’ve added a feedback widget on our platform and have a dedicated email address for product feedback, which both internal and external users have access to. We collect feedback through ongoing surveys such as NPS, and directly from our customer facing teams including Sales and Customer Support. Our UX research team and product managers keep track of incoming feedback which is then added to our project backlog, and prioritized. We also use this phase to gather problem specific feedback by conducting discovery interviews, surveys and analytics to better understand the problem or opportunity. We create artifacts such as user personas, and user stories that we refer to during the project lifecycle.
Define
Our product managers and UX researchers gather information, insights and observations uncovered during the discovery phase to identify themes and uncover potential problems. By defining the problem, we are able to focus our attention on that problem and eliminate potential distractions. Here, we are able to create our problem statement which is what we focus on and ideate for our next phase. The designers begin conducting competitor analysis, looking at how others are currently solving the problem (or similar problems). By doing this, we are able to see what is or isn’t working and bring this inspiration back to the team as a jumping off point during our ideation phase.
Design
We’ve combined 3 of the traditional design thinking steps into one phase called Design. Ideate, Prototype, and Test are all steps we go through and have combined into one larger phase called ‘Design’. During this phase, the designers work closely with the product managers and UX researchers to understand business requirements and user’s needs.
Ideate
Ideation is never limited to designers. Everyone on the team has the opportunity to come up with ideas, and this is often done during our design sprints. This is where designers, developers, QA, product managers, and researchers come together to produce ideas. We also invite various stakeholders across the company to participate in Ask the Expert sessions to gain a more holistic understanding of the problem. Having members of different departments present helps us think through the problem from other perspectives and fuels our creative thinking. Having a diverse set of perspectives helps us create a diverse set of ideas. Throughout our ideation process, we refer back to our problem statement and our user personas to ensure the ideas we are coming up with will address our user’s problems. Coming out of our design sprint or ideation workshop, we have at least one (sometimes more) idea we want to test with our users.
Prototype
The designers take the ideas and solutions we created during our ideate phase and turn them into designs that we’ll be able to test with. The idea is to quickly create design prototypes to get real user feedback early. By getting real users to interact with our designs in the early stages, we are able to quickly pivot on our solutions, and incorporate our user’s feedback.
Test
When we are in our testing phase, we like to chat directly with our users. It’s important for us to test our potential solutions prior to development to ensure we are actually solving the problem we set out to solve. Our UX researchers conduct our testing sessions, with the designer or product manager present to listen, take notes and ask questions. Having the designer present in these sessions really helps them understand the context of why something is or isn’t working and speeds up our ability to make changes to the design.
We use the testing sessions as an opportunity to ask our users any unanswered questions we might have and gain more insights of their workflows. We anchor our conversation around the prototype we’ve created and use scenario testing questions to observe how the participants might use the prototype. The insights we gather from this phase directly impacts the design, which can result in slight revisions or full redesigns.
Iterative Mindset
As we move through our project cycles, it’s important to note that we’re working towards shipping an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) solution. An MVP/iterative mindset is critical for our system to succeed and allows us to keep our processes, requirements and documentation as lean as possible. This means that instead of spending months or years to release huge changes all at one time, we break up our ideal solution into smaller iterative pieces. This allows the teams to produce improvements quickly while evaluating whether we’ve solved the greater problem with each iteration. This mindset is what allows us to revisit work quickly and make continuous improvements. The design team’s role is to work with our PMs to identify how and where to iterate our work into smaller packages for our development team to move forward with.
Development
As the title suggests, during our development phase our wonderful development team brings our solutions to life with code. We collaborate with our developers early into our design process to scope out tech feasibility and get their opinions on the solution we’re proposing. Since our developers have such vast knowledge of how our platform works, that often makes them the best people to ask questions, identify edge cases and dig deeper into specific experiences or features. Once the development is underway, the designers check in to test the designs and provide QA notes related to the UX/UI while our QA team members work to test the full functionality.
Deploy
Up until now, we’ve worked hard to identify our users’ needs, identify the problem, create a solution that we think will solve the problem, tested it with real users and incorporated user feedback into the final design. During the deploy phase, we release this hard work into the wild. Once a project or feature has been released, we continue to collect, monitor and sometimes act upon incoming feedback. Though we try our best to design the best solutions for the problem at hand, it’s unrealistic to think that any design is perfect. What works for one, might not work for another. This is why we closely monitor our releases and act quickly to feedback when needed. Otherwise we allow the solution to be in the wild and monitor the metrics associated with the project, then provide monthly updates to the team on key metrics.
Who can use design thinking?
Everyone! Although it’s name does include ‘design’, design thinking is not exclusive to designers. Anyone with a problem who is looking for creative ways to solve it can use the design thinking process. Just remember to keep the humans you’re solutioning for at the core of your problem solving.
Closing Thoughts
This was a quick glimpse into how we use design thinking. Every project has different needs and we adapt the process, activities and artifacts to best fit the problem we’re trying to solve. As we practice design thinking, we are always looking for ways to refine our process and further incorporate our users. By following the design thinking process and methodology, anyone is able to identify and solve real problems, by using empathy and collaboration.
