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Stages of Design Process

The stages of the design process are: 1. Empathize - Research users' needs through interviews, surveys, observations, and competitor analysis to understand the problem. 2. Define - Organize research findings into common themes to define the core problems and opportunities. 3. Ideate - Brainstorm creative solutions through sketching, storyboarding, journey mapping, and wireframing. 4. Prototype - Create experimental models of solutions to test before full development. 5. Test - Validate prototypes work as intended through testing to ensure a deep understanding of the product and users.

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70 views4 pages

Stages of Design Process

The stages of the design process are: 1. Empathize - Research users' needs through interviews, surveys, observations, and competitor analysis to understand the problem. 2. Define - Organize research findings into common themes to define the core problems and opportunities. 3. Ideate - Brainstorm creative solutions through sketching, storyboarding, journey mapping, and wireframing. 4. Prototype - Create experimental models of solutions to test before full development. 5. Test - Validate prototypes work as intended through testing to ensure a deep understanding of the product and users.

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Uwangue Evidence
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STAGES OF DESIGN PROCESS

Empathize => Define => Ideate => Prototype => Test

1. EMPATHIZE:
This stage of design thinking process focuses on user-centric research, this is the
stage where everything starts, here we carry out research about our users’ needs.
We try as much as possible to gather all information we can lay our hands as
regards the project we’re working on to understand the problem we’re trying to solve.

NB: The main aim here is to develop the best possible understanding of the users,
their needs and the problem we’re trying to solve, i.e deeper understanding of users.

Some method of user research include:

I. User Interviews: This is a very common qualitative research technique that can
be conducted in-person or remotely. Although while organizing and analysing
findings from interviews can be time-consuming, the benefit of this method is that
you can uncover insights from direct conversation with users than from surveys
alone.

II. Online surveys: This can be carried out using surveys and questionnaires that
enable you to obtain a large volume of quantitative data in a short amount of time.
Whilst they can be relatively quick and inexpensive to run, the downside to this is
that you may lack deeper insights that you would normally get from in-person
interactions.

III. Contextual inquiry: This method you observe how people go about their
day-to-day tasks in their natural environment. This allows you to truly empathize with
your users, as it forces you to put yourself in their shoes.

IV. Market research: Understanding how your competitors approach similar


problems is a crucial component of the product design process, as it allows you to
learn from their design patterns and mistakes.

After collecting the data from user research, we often merge our findings by
grouping them into common themes for better understanding. This can be carried
out by a process called Affinity mapping. Affinity mapping allows us to form insights
from raw data, which we can then use to inform our decision-making.
Common characteristics found from the research were:

● Unhealthy habits: Due to the blending of work and home environments,


there was a tendency for people to work longer hours than usual. Sitting down
for too long and not moving around as much meant that remote workers were
experiencing physical health issues such as back pain as their lifestyle
became more sedentary.

● Isolation: The lack of coffee chats, social gatherings and hallway chats
usually found in office environments meant that many people living alone
were experiencing isolation from loss of in-person connections.
Prolonged quarantine and lock-downs have contributed to a rise in
mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

● Distractions: External environmental factors such as children and pets,


as well as technological disruptions from poor internet and electricity
blackouts, have led to a loss in focus times and productivity. This meant
that remote workers would often work overtime to compensate for the
loss in productivity, leading to a vicious cycle of unhealthy habits.
2. DEFINE:

This is the stage you will organize the information you’ve gathered during the
Empathize stage. You’ll analyse your observations to define the core problems
you and your team have identified up to this point. Here we can start to focus on
the core user issues and turn them into opportunities by using what we call the
problem statement definition. This step is important as it allows you to
understand the goal of your design project and provide a clear objective to work
towards.

3. IDEATE:

At this stage, team members brainstorm on a range of creative ideas and


solutions that address the problem statement, generate a range of potential
solutions by giving yourself and your team total freedom. This is an extremely
valuable step as it allows you to build trust by getting stakeholders together in a
room to align on the future vision.

Product teams have a lot of techniques for ideation, some include:

● Sketching: This is the easiest way to visualize ideas, which is very helpful
for visualizing what some aspects of the design will look like.

● Storyboarding: which is used to visualize the overall interactions with a


product.

● User Journey Mapping: A user journey map is a visualization of the


process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
Typically, it’s presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts
with a product.

● Wireframing: A wireframe is a visual guide that represents a page’s


structure, as well as its hierarchy and key elements. Wireframes are
useful for discussing ideas with team members and stakeholders, and to
assist the work of visual designers and developers.
4. PROTOTYPE:

This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible
solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The
solutions are implemented within the prototypes and, one by one, they are
investigated and then accepted, improved or rejected based on the users’
experiences, in other words this is an experimental model of an idea that
enables you to test it before building the full solution. A prototype often starts
small, with you designing a few core parts of a product (such as key user flows)
and grows in breadth and depth over multiple iterations as required areas are
built out. The finalized version of a prototype is handed off for development.

5. TEST:

The testing and validation phase helps a product team ensure the design
concept works as intended, the ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding
of the product and its users as possible. Product testing is an art in itself. Do it
wrong and you’ll learn nothing. Do it right, and you might get incredible,
unexpected insights that might even change your product strategy.

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