UX Design Thinking explained with 4 examples

UX design thinking is an ideology and process for solving complex problems in a user-centered way. It allows developers to come up with innovative ideas to provide products that users can actually enjoy and benefit from.

This type of design process is especially important in a market saturated with so many similar products, where it is difficult for companies to stand out. By using a solutions-based approach, companies gain a competitive advantage by producing attractive products or services.

Here, we explore the concept of design thinking as it relates to UX and illustrate what the five-step process involves. We will analyze its main benefits and provide some examples of successful scenarios where companies have applied this approach.

Defining User Experience Design Thinking

Before getting started with any type of user experience design and UX design thinking, designers and developers need to understand the basic principles of the process.

What is UX Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process that development teams use for practical and creative problem solving. Using this non-linear process, developers generate creative solutions that address complicated and even unknown issues in the product development problem space. Considers the needs, thoughts and behaviors of real users to challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create possible solutions. These solutions become prototypes that users obtain to test solutions, thus providing developers with valuable feedback.

This structure relies heavily on the methods and processes that designers use daily in the product development process. What sets it apart is the increased collaboration between designers and users and the emphasis on empathy. It focuses on humans first. Companies need to understand what kind of problems they face and how their products can help them. This practice differs from UX design on a few levels.

While this process focuses on finding solutions to user problems, UX design focuses on conceptualizing such solutions and ensuring their usability and accessibility. Design thinking works as a set of tools that UX designers can access during development to create great user experiences.

Key principles

The key principles of UX design involve empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. They are especially useful for solving ill-defined or unknown problems. Its main features are:

• Empathy: To uncover the right problems, developers must identify with and have a deep understanding of the people they are trying to help. This is why it is so important to empathize with users. To become more empathetic, developers must conduct thorough research to understand common pain points. They can do this through field studies, user personas, or user experience maps. This process is continuous and influences many decisions throughout the process.
• Defining Problems: After knowing their users and their pain points, designers must clearly define their problems by creating problem statements. They must make these points specific and user-centric. Otherwise, the framework derails because business goals overshadow user needs. To define problems, the development team can map potential obstacles, interpret user research, and plan logistical details.
• Ideation: With the user's problems defined, the process moves on to idealization. Here, the team generates new ideas that redefine the user experience in the project. The best way to achieve this is through brainstorming, word banking, and mind mapping to visualize thoughts clearly.
• Prototyping: Prototypes are a great way to develop ideas from the previous stage. Using sketches, interactive wireframes, or even paper models, teams can assess feasibility from the start without wasting time or money. Many of today's collaborative design tools come with advanced prototyping features like animation.
• Testing: In the final phase of this process, users gain access to prototypes and participate in moderated testing sessions. They have the ability to interact with the product and provide useful feedback in real time. The design team then uses it to figure out what problems need to be solved and what improvements need to occur before launch.

The Design Thinking Process

The UX design thinking process includes five main phases. The team starts by empathizing with its users and understanding them to define their problems and devise possible solutions. They narrow down the best ideas and bring them to life by creating prototypes. Users access and test these prototypes, providing feedback to the development team to develop and improve the final product before releasing it to the market.

Phase One: Empathy – Understanding Users’ Needs

Empathy is the first step in this process. Companies need to put themselves in their customers' shoes. They must understand the problems they are trying to solve through research. This is crucial for a human-centered design process like design thinking, which involves letting go of company assumptions and getting real information about users and their wants, needs, and goals.

Development teams must observe and interact with different people and understand them better on a psychological and emotional level. To understand what customers think, what problems they face and what they need, companies use methods such as listening, interviewing and conducting surveys.

Phase two: definition – statement of user needs and problems

This second stage of the design thinking process is where the team defines the problem by bringing together their findings and trying to understand them. This is often called the problem-solving definition phase. They try to understand what difficulties and barriers their users face, observe patterns, and identify pressing problems that need to be resolved.

After synthesizing this information, developers define key problems and obtain clear problem statements structured in a user-centered way. They are the basis for the next phase of the process, where developers try to present ideas and solutions.

Phase Three: Ideation – Determining Potential Solutions

In the third step, the team has a solid understanding of their users and a problem definition in mind. Then you can start working on potential solutions. Ideation phase sessions are creative meetings where team members work together to come up with as many ideas and angles as possible, using various ideation techniques.

Through brainstorming, mind mapping, body storming and provocation, team members can start to “think outside the box” and look for many alternative solutions to different problems identified by users. By the end of the ideation phase, the team should be able to narrow down their list of ideas to a few that they can develop and eventually test.

Phase Four: Prototyping – Building True Solutions

Prototyping is an experimental phase in which developers identify the best possible solutions for each problem and try to turn their ideas into tangible products. They create solutions in the form of cheap, scaled-down versions of their products that incorporate the potential solutions defined in the previous steps.

Having a visual representation of the product facilitates the process of accepting, improving, redesigning or rejecting different solutions, depending on their performance in prototype form.

Prototypes allow companies to discover the best ideas. They also make it easier to receive user feedback, improvise original ideas at affordable costs, and provide a clear picture of what the final product could be.

Phase Five: Testing – Solutions Assessment

After prototyping comes user testing, where developers send the prototype to users to really determine if the product satisfies their wants and needs. After receiving feedback, team members often return to previous stages to reframe new issues, fix bugs, and update the product accordingly. They must perfect the product before launching it.

There are several ways to conduct efficient user testing, such as remote user testing, A/B testing, and usability testing. Observation, interviews, surveys and questionnaires are often sufficient.

It is normal to think that design thinking is a linear process, since all these phases have a very logical sequence. However, this structure is not linear. In fact, it is quite flexible and fluid. Each phase brings a new discovery that forces developers to rethink and redefine their previous actions. They often revert to the early stages, rarely moving in a straight line.

Examples of the Design Thinking process

Many of today's most popular companies, apps and websites use a design thinking process in their products and business presentations.

Airbnb

Airbnb is a multi-billion dollar online platform that started out earning only approximately $200 per week. This company is one of the best examples of design thinking. The founders recognized that the photos hosts posted of their places were not high-quality enough, deterring customers from using the platform and renting rooms.

Airbnb didn't receive many bookings because users weren't sure what they were paying for. As a way to empathize with their users, the founders traveled to different locations, imagining what users would look for in a temporary place to stay. They then worked with different hosts, invested in high-quality cameras, and took better photos of what customers wanted to see based on different travel destinations. They insisted on taking photos of every room, listing special, attractive features and highlighting interesting neighboring areas.

This non-scalable, non-technical solution doubled the company's revenue in one week. Airbnb used design thinking to determine why its users weren't using its services and figured out how to make its listings more attractive with a few simple tweaks.

GE Health

Another example of a company that focused on design thinking to improve a product is GE Healthcare. Although its diagnostic imaging services had no problems, the company realized there was a problem with how children responded to the procedures.

These patients often cried while being exposed to these long procedures that took place in cold, dark rooms. This led the GE Healthcare team to observe pediatric patients in different settings, speak with experts and interview hospital staff to gain more insight into their experiences. Empathy with younger patients led the company to create and implement the “Adventure Series”, an initiative focused on making MRI machines more suitable for children. For example, the “Pirate Island Adventure” MRI room features pirate ships with views of beaches, sandcastles and the ocean.

Providing a creative solution to these pain points helped increase patient satisfaction rates by 90%, which also led to better exam quality, saving patients time and resources.

Oral B Electric Toothbrush

The design thinking process is also a great way to test initiatives before implementing them. A good example of this is Oral B and its electric toothbrush. When the company wanted to update its electric toothbrush, the request was to add more functions for users, such as monitoring brushing frequency, observing gum sensitivity and even playing music.

Researching and interviewing users allowed the development team to discover that people often get nervous about not brushing their teeth. Access to detailed data about your hygiene habits would only increase anxiety.

The empathy and definition phases then led to the ideation of two solutions that could still improve the user experience without adding complex features. This included making the brush easier to carry, especially for users who travel, and making it more convenient to order replacement heads by connecting the brushes to phones and sending notifications.

IBM Cloud

IBM used the design thinking mindset when creating Bluemix, which is now called IBM Cloud. This is a cloud platform for application development that helps developers from large enterprises create cloud-based applications faster and easier.

Working closely with its target audience and correctly identifying their pain points and needs, the company created a successful product that has attracted more than a million developers. Its most popular features include:

• Providing choice – Developers can create consistent applications that work on-premises and off-premises, reducing the cost and time associated with configuring infrastructure.
• Extensive catalog of tools – IBM Cloud offers more than 170 tools covering data, containers, AI, IoT, and blockchain.
• Methodology – This platform uses a set of DevOps tools. It allows development teams to easily scale their projects.

Benefits of User Experience Design Thinking

This concept is a very popular and important framework because it brings companies, development teams, and users a wide variety of benefits:

• Inspiring creativity and promoting innovation – Creativity leads the development of projects and products. The design thinking process allows the collection of creative solutions, gathering inspiration from customers.
• Satisfying Users – Before implementing any solution, companies allow users to check and test ideas. Developers take your feedback into consideration, making sure to deliver the final product only when it meets the user's crucial requirements.
• Putting humans first – Because this process focuses so much on empathy, companies take real users and their experiences into account. They are much more likely to produce a truly useful and useful product and hit the mark when it comes to creating meaningful user experiences.
• Company-wide – This concept applies to many areas beyond design. Because it encourages group thinking and collaboration between teams, it is suitable for virtually any team in any sector, such as business, education, and science.
• Easy to understand – This structure is quite easy to follow. In fact, there is no necessary set of skills to implement it.
• Improving efficiency – With design thinking, developers can check whether a proposed idea or solution meets user requirements without having to create an actual product for testing purposes. This improves development efficiency while saving a lot of time and money.
• Reducing time to market – The heavy emphasis on problem solving and finding viable solutions helps companies reduce the time spent on design and development. This is especially true when developers combine the design thinking process with lean and agile methodologies.
• Reducing costs and improving ROI – By reducing a company’s time to market, this structure ultimately saves the business a lot of money and produces a significant ROI of up to 300% .
• Improve customer retention and loyalty – Relying on user empathy and its user-centric approach, the design thinking process helps increase user engagement and customer retention in the long term.

How to incorporate good user experience into your designs

Companies can adapt many different strategies to incorporate good UX into their designs. The first step to creating a product with the ideal user experience is to gain a deeper understanding of your users and keep them in mind throughout the development process.

It's important to consider what they might need from a product or service and how they feel at each touchpoint. The best tool to help imagine potential customers' experience when creating a new product is customer journey maps.

Good UX designs remain accessible and work for everyone, including those with hearing and vision impairments. Companies must comply with accessibility standards in their UX practices to increase the number of people who can interact with their products. Considering accessibility is another great way to empathize with your audience.

Consistency is another important UX design best practice. Maintaining consistent designs limits confusion, builds trust, and reinforces your brand. They allow users to learn how to navigate the UI faster, perform their tasks with ease, and avoid distractions or confusion.

Companies must pay attention to visual and functional consistency, as well as maintaining consistent voice, tone, and familiar patterns.

When writing for users, companies need to keep their text clear, concise and accessible so that users don't have to guess what they are reading. Ideally, product copy should be at an 8th grade reading level and not require specialized knowledge.

Continuous testing is another important strategy to ensure good UX designs. Companies need to perform usability testing and leverage the resulting data to constantly improve their products. Testing methods like A/B testing, heat mapping, and recording live feedback from users interacting with the product are great methods. Depending on the results, developers should adjust their products accordingly and then carry out further testing.

Finally, selecting the right UX tools is crucial to success. There are many tools on the market, but some stand out among their competitors. The most popular user research UX tools are UXCam, UserTesting, and Hotjar. Developers often choose to work with Balsamiq, AdobeXD, and Figma for wireframing and prototyping, while Overflow is a favorite flowchart UX tool.

Conclusion

A user-centered methodology, UX design thinking is an iterative framework based on the needs, thoughts and behaviors of real users for practical and creative problem solving. This process helps developers turn ideas into prototypes that users can test and provide actionable feedback to developers.

The five main principles of this process include empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing. These principles further define the process and divide it into five non-linear phases. Using design thinking when creating a product improves the product and the process, inspiring creative ideas, promoting innovation and improving efficiency, while helping companies reduce time to market and costs.

The design thinking process helps companies innovate and create products that solve real user problems. The resulting solutions are not only visually appealing, but also easy to use, intuitive and effective. By using this framework and following its fundamental principles, companies create meaningful experiences for their users while driving innovation in their design projects. This reflects the fundamental principles of design thinking ideology.

Common questions

What makes UX design thinking unique?

User experience design thinking has some unique qualities that set it apart from other design methodologies. It is solution-based rather than problem-based and focuses entirely on users' needs. It is extremely simple to understand and anyone can use and apply it.

This framework uses methods that enable empathy, seeks to define the problem as actively as it does to find solutions, idealizes and explores results, and solves many different types of problems. It is also inherently collaborative and involves prototyping, embodying the spirit of user-centered design.

How can I use user research in UX design thinking?

User research is the study of user behavior when interacting with a specific product. It allows companies to understand what users think about their products and how they feel when using them. It is at the heart of user experience design thinking and includes two important aspects: listening and observing users. Companies can conduct their user research in a few different ways, including using online surveys, conducting interviews, and creating user personas.

What are some common tools used in User Experience Design Thinking?

Development teams use a wide variety of tools in the different phases of the user experience design thinking process. The most popular include UXCam, UserTesting, and Hotjar for user research; Balsamiq, AdobeXD and Figma for wireframing and prototyping; and Overflow to create flowcharts. These tools assist in the process of creating innovative solutions.