Design thinking is all about being human. The methodology focuses on three essential aspects: empathy and human centeredness, ideation, prototyping and experimentation. When done correctly, it helps businesses effectively manage risks, resulting from introduction of new ideas needed to redesign a dying website. Because of this, the design thinking methodology can help developers focus more on bringing innovative designs rather than just incremental improvements to their sites. Adoption of this creative web design approach, would also enable businesses to learn faster – moving beyond UX, beating its competitors head-on.
Start with thinking like your customers
Empathy and human centeredness – the first two steps in design thinking process, aim to understand your target audience through being a good listener, understanding customers’ non-verbal expressions and building a deep sense of concern and desire to help. There are various empathize methods that can be used in user experience design, such as creating customer journey maps, conducting interviews with empathy and using photo and video-based studies.
Journey maps are visual or graphic representation from a customer’s perspective of their end-to-end user experience of your website. This is mainly done by sketching the user’s journey complete with all touch points (i.e. actions and interactions such as payment or initiating a conversation). From there, designers would try to define the problem of the customer based from the information that they have gathered. This is done through creating a problem statement that can be derived through building an empathy map, a point of view problem statement or formulating “how might we” questions. The empathy map – one of the mostly used tool of the design thinking methodology, is done by laying out a piece of paper and dividing it to four quadrants of what might the customer said, did, thought and felt. This simple yet very effective tool for creative web design, allow designers to discover insights about their users and is a valuable input to redesign a website that is in accordance to their needs.
Continue with challenging the current design
The third step in the design thinking methodology is ideation. The stage where developers start to generate new perspectives on user experience design, all information gathered from empathy and problem definition would lead the way to creation of varying points of view that will guide innovative efforts turning it to valid, insightful, actionable and meaningful action items. A very useful approach to creative web design, it allows developers to generate new ideas for websites that are in desperate need of change. One of the most effective tool of ideation is SCAMPER.
SCAMPER or short for: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate and Reverse are seven provocation (i.e. a creative and indirect problem solving approach) lenses that will enable developers to step up their user experience design. SCAMPER will help innovate an existing website through asking questions based on the seven provocations to come up with improvements. For example, on the Substitute provocation, a designer can ask: Can I change the website’s layout to make it appeal more to my users? or Shall I change the color and font of my website to make it look more modern? This guide created by Interaction Design Foundation, would help you go through the SCAMPER technique in detail. Remember, when using this design thinking methodology, it is possible to generate ideas that are impractical or may not suit your situation. However, don’t worry too much about this. The goal of SCAMPER is to generate as much idea as you can to find more unique ways of approaching web redesign.
Prototype and experiment, don’t be afraid to make mistakes!
The last two steps, prototyping and continuous experimentation enable creative web design teams to develop inexpensive, scaled down versions of their new websites or products that would help identify the best possible solution for improvement. Prototypes either low or high fidelity is a design thinking methodology that would allow quick and easy tests of creative web designs. Remember – as prototypes are meant to be quick and easy, do not over-analyze and just start building. The sooner you can get the design out of your head, the faster you are going to get feedback. Also, do not spend too much time in prototyping as the goal is to test the idea and receive insights. Always remember your users and do not deviate from your journey map.
There are various approaches that you can use in both low and high fidelity prototyping. Most commonly used low fidelity prototype for user experience design is sketching, card sorting and Wizard of Oz. Wizard of Oz, also known as WOZ prototyping is a type of design thinking methodology, commonly used in rapid application development (RAD) for user experience design. It is used for designing complex systems that needs to be tested right away to gather feedback. WOZ starts by choosing an idea that needs to be tested and creating a prototype through a combination of images, videos, animations and other elements to create and simulate a real and working website. Participants will be recruited to test this prototype and a “wizard” or an observer will be assigned to look closely at the user’s actions while making the prototype react as if it’s a real website. The wizard’s reaction to user clicks must be fast, otherwise participants will know that it’s a fake and it will be very difficult to gather insights on what aspect of the design works or fails.
High fidelity prototypes on the other hand looks closer to the finish product and is normally created using a design program. Free creative web design tools that can help you develop really good web and even mobile prototypes with simple drag and drop and minor configurations are Mobirise, Just in Mind and Neonto. High-fi prototypes allow designers to gather feedback with high validity and applicability as it gives a close to accurate feedback on how users will respond, interact and perceive your website’s new design.
Design thinking is a methodology that focuses on empathy, creating deep insights to customer behavior and needs, leading to a website redesign that will increase customer value. There are a lot of tools and guides on the web that can help you undergo the entire process. We highly recommend Stanford’s D School and The Interaction Design Foundation.
