Every business in today’s savvy world is attempting to create a meaningful user experience. A compelling user experience design takes the lead when it comes to a company’s online presence. A UX design that isn’t supported by a UX design thinking process and a UX strategy will not help a company thrive.
We’ll go over the design thinking process and how it’s applied in the real world. From start to finish, you’ll learn everything there is to know about this process.
What actually is the UX design thinking process?
Design thinking is the process of applying innovation and creativity to real-world design problems.
The goal of UX design is to create the next-generation digital product. This is a non-linear process with four key steps that repeat themselves in a highly iterative loop. To generate an actionable idea, the UX design team goes back and forth in the process.
It is the preference of UX designers to use a specific approach to design products. Approaches such as design thinking are among them. As a result of the fact that some design ideas don’t work out the way the designers expected. Determining the root cause of a design failure can be a difficult task. Because of this, the design thinking approach provides designers with a logical path to investigate problems and test solutions.
Let’s dive deep into the design thinking process.
The Four Stages of the UX design thinking process:
For your company, UX design is worth its weight in gold. For this reason, it’s crucial to know whether your website’s designed experience is supporting your company in reaching its goals.
The UX design thinking process, like any other process, should be devised in four stages:
Stage 1: Conduct in-depth user research:
It’s common for UX design developers to become impatient and eager to jump right into a project without a plan. It’s not the most efficient way to develop a web UX design quickly. What matters is that you devote yourself to the user’s journey and master two critical steps.
Step 1: Discovery of the customer journey:
The way a customer interacts with your website is how he interacts with your brand. Keeping this in mind, your UX design thinking process should include a focus on the customer touchpoints on your website. It’s because the customer advances from brand recognition to emotional engagement and then purchases, completing the website funnel. As a result, the UX design for a website must be a unified experience with interconnected touchpoints.
Whatever you want to deliver to your customers through your website — products, information, or services — the first step is to pique their desire of wanting. The desire is always sparked by an interaction with a website. It essentially means that your website is responsible for shaping your brand’s image. To this end, a UX design process must consider the entire consumer journey.
Questions to ask before conducting user research:
Professional UX design companies always ask three questions at this stage:
A great intellectual question
A thought to three — why what, and how — questions:
- Why does your business need a website UX design in the first place?
- What part of your customer’s journey prompts a user experience design demand?
- How many roles will the new UX design play in gaining new goals?
The search questions
This step will show your UX design company exactly where your business stands. It provides a realistic perspective on how to design a new UX design for your website.
- What is the status of your company’s website right now?
- Who are the users? How do they behave? What are their goals, motivations, and needs?
- Which elements of the website are causing users problems?
The future performance question
- How will the new UX design provide you with measurable success metrics?
- How will UX design increase user engagement, simplify the user journey, and increase conversions?
Step 2: User Research:
What is user research in the UX design thinking process? User research is the study of a wide range of users’ behaviors with your product in order to develop a real-time UX design thinking process. It is the understanding of what users think about your product and how they feel after interacting with it. It’s also called the analysis stage. It shifts the frame of reference that what is intuitive for you may not be meaningful for your customers. You begin to see the UX design from their mindset.
With that view, user research is at the heart of the UX thinking process. So, even if your UX design company followed the entire process, designing a UX strategy without user research may not be enough to give you the intended outcomes.
What makes user research so critical in the UX design thinking process?
There are many reasons:
- When we create UX designs based on our judgments, we overlook the user experience. In this way, we miss a chance to upgrade our services or products.
- The market is in constant flux. Cyclic conversion occurs when we add customers’ voices continually to the website’s UX design strategy.
A UX design company cannot even begin to build a UX without the findings of user research. Doubtlessly, this step saves time, effort, and money later on when it comes to meeting user demands.
What exactly does user research involve?
User research includes two important aspects: listening to users and observing them. The majority of businesses place a high value on listening while completely ignoring user observation — a gap in user research. Companies that specialize in user experience design conduct research in a variety of ways, including:
Conduct Online surveys:
In an online survey, potential users fill the online UX design forum with specific questions. The information is gathered by the UX design team.
Conduct interviews:
It involves having a one-on-one conversation with the user, asking various questions, observing them as they interact with your website, and discovering their issues along the way. This is something that the UX design company performs best at.
Create Users persona:
The UX design company chooses a real audience, does some research on them, and finds out what their goals, motivations, and needs are. They create a realistic picture of the user’s desires and reveal common characteristics.
Stage 2: Define and Ideate:
Until now, you have learned your user completely in stage 1. Now, it’s time to define the user problem in your UX design and ideate a possible solution.
Define the user problem in UX design:
After you’ve learned about your user’s wants, needs, and concerns, try to define a problem statement to address their concerns. In this step of the design thinking process, your UX design company combines broken bits of user data into manageable components. They attempt to respond to all of the “Why, Where, and How” questions that they gathered during the research phase.
An actionable problem statement defines the gap between the current state of the UX design and its desired future state. The UX design company can clearly state the user problem if your problem statement meets the following criteria:
- User-centric and human-centred design
- Open to new ideas and inventiveness
- Considering the future direction of UX design
Important to notice:
An actionable problem statement is really important to kick start the successful ideation process.
Ideation in UX design:
This is the next step in devising a possible solution to the problem statement created in the previous step. The UX designers team captures as many ideas as possible. It makes no difference whether the ideas are bad or good because no one will judge them at this stage. Designers are free to think outside the box and try new things. As you can see, the quantity of ideas is more important than quality at this stage.
To finalize the final idea, the UX designers’ team meets for several sessions to:
- Discuss all the gathered possible ideas with the UX designers’ team.
- Destroy the worst ideas.
- Analyze the possible ideas closer to the problem statement from different angles.
- Choose the best idea for wireframing and prototyping.
Stage 3: Wireframing and prototyping:
As the UX design company conducts extensive user research, they develop the wireframes and prototypes to visualize your website.
Wireframes in UX design:
What exactly is a wireframe?
A wireframe is a schematic visual representation of your website that the UX designers create before they deploy the design as part of the design thinking process. They strictly outline every element on the web pages, including the page structure, navigation, layout, themes, information architecture, usability, and functionality.
In a nutshell, a wireframe addresses all of your concerns about your website that you may have about your final design. It entails;
- The designer’s clear communication with you
- Make a list of all the features of the interface.
- Help make the process iterative.
- Determine the usability and functionality of web design.
- Improve the efficiency of your content development strategy.
Important to notice:
The focus of wireframes in the design thinking process is on the functionality and usability of the website rather than its intuitiveness. Because if a user finds a website difficult to use, they will ignore the style and appeal of the website.
What role does the wireframe play for UX designers?
Wireframes allow our UX designers at our UX design company to do the following:
- Visualize the website’s information architecture.
- Create various methods for displaying the best template to the client.
- What should be prioritized and what to avoid in UX design.
- Offer adequate insight into the location of images, buttons, and other interactive elements.
- Prepare the UX design team to drive value in order to create a better prototype.
UX designers either create the UX design by hand or digitally. Nowadays, digital wireframes are more common. Whatever the way your UX design company chooses, ask them to create wireframes as soon as possible, as they are critical to the success of the subsequent stages.
Prototypes in UX design:
What is prototyping in UX design?
Prototyping is the website’s final advanced visual representation. It is, at long last, an early essential facet of the website. These are similar to wireframes, but they have more details and interacting points for testing the website’s functionality. It allows the client, stakeholders, or designers to see the errors as well as the exact features that they tend to include in the final product. Before investing in full-fledged development, the UX design team fixes these flaws and inconsistencies in the early design thinking process.
Advantages of prototypes:
- Identify and describe the final possible idea and put it to the test with a user.
- Make it easier and less confusing to get feedback from users and clients.
- Quickly improvise the original idea, if necessary, without costing a lot of money.
- Provide a clear image of the final website.
- Give a first-hand look at the final website to interact with it in real-time.
In this experimental step of UX design, the UX design company must take the aesthetic look of the website into account, which the wireframe does not. They also consider the color, images, themes, and appeal of the website. That’s why, in the UX design thinking process, prototyping is a step ahead of wireframing.
Stage 4: User testing in UX Design Thinking Process:
The final but most important stage of the design thinking process is user testing. The UX design early sample is shown to a real user after successful prototyping. User testing reveals what UX design improvements are needed across the board, as well as what gaps remain from the previous design thinking process.
Changes are made as a result of the users’ reactions, behavioral patterns, and feedback. In any case, it’s better to say that user testing should be done after each step of the design thinking process, but this can be quite expensive. This is the most difficult and time-consuming stage, but it is also the most valuable.
How to conduct efficient user testing?
- User testing can be done in a variety of ways, including remote user testing, A/B testing, and usability testing.
- Simple observation, interviews, surveys, and questionnaires are different means of conducting user testing.
If all five stages of the design thinking process are performed effectively, your UX design company will create the winning UX design for your website.
Conclusion:
To sum up the discussion, the user experience design thinking process for your website is not simple. User research, definition, ideation, wireframing, prototyping, and user testing are all necessary steps in the UX design process. It’s a cycle, with the UX design going back to the beginning at any point in the process.
The design thinking process changes how you think about UX design and how you see it from the customer’s perspective. Its success will determine the future success of your company. In our opinion, it isn’t you or a freelance UX designer’s job. Your UX design needs the involvement of the entire UX design and development team. As a result, for your website’s UI/UX design, it’s a good idea to hire a professional web development and design company. You’ll get additional benefits than simply the best design for your website when you work with us.
As we have the best in-house UX designers, our UX design company will provide you with the best possible experience and success-oriented UX design.
