How do you validate your assumptions and user needs with design thinking methods?

To really understand users' needs, wants, and pain points, spend time immersing yourself in their world. Conduct in-depth interviews, observe them in their natural environment, and try to put yourself in their shoes. Ask open-ended questions to uncover their motivations, challenges, and aspirations. Create personas based on your insights. This will greatly help you in designing solutions that resonate with users on an emotional level and address their real needs, rather than just making assumptions based on surface-level demographics or behaviours.

1. Empathize: Start by understanding users' needs and experiences. 2. Define: Formulate clear, actionable problem statements. 3. Ideate: Generate many possible solutions to these problems. 4. Prototype: Create low-fidelity versions of your solutions. 5. Test: Validate your solutions with real users. 6. Iterate: Use feedback to refine and improve your solutions. 7. Implement: Turn validated solutions into final products.

Understanding goals, context is really important and necessary since empathy helps you avoid making biased assumptions based on your own perspectives. We can use various methods to overcome it like surveys, observations, personas and journey maps. These methods help us in collecting quantitative and qualitative data about users and their experiences with product.

Encourage "out of the box" ideas and be strong about deferring judgement during brainstorming sessions. Use techniques like mind mapping, sketching, or "How Might We" statements (the last one is a powerful verbal tool) to explore from multiple angles. Aim for quantity over quality initially, then converge and prioritise the most promising concepts based on their feasibility, viability, and desirability. The goal at this stage is to expand the list of possibilities, not to settle on a single "right" answer prematurely.

We can ideate through many methods like brainstorming, mind mapping, sketching and story boarding. I recently had a project with my teammates where we made a story board that helped us understand the vision, problem and the solution for the problem at the end. These help us explore many angles, perspectives and possibilities without judging or filtering them too early.

Start by embracing empathy. Use tools like user interviews, journey mapping, and empathy mapping to deeply understand user perspectives. Then, employ rapid prototyping and user testing to iterate and validate designs swiftly. Tools like Miro, Figma, and UsabilityHub can aid in this process, ensuring your solutions resonate with real user needs. Remember, it's all about staying close to the user throughout the design journey.

Developing prototypes allows you to quickly and inexpensively bring your ideas to life in a tangible form. Prototypes can be really "low fi" - for example using simple materials like paper, cardboard, or digital wireframes to test key aspects of your proposed solution. Focus on the core user experience and interactions rather than getting bogged down in aesthetics or technicalities at this point. Use prototypes to elicit feedback, answer questions, and identify areas for improvement. Refine your prototypes based on user input and evolve your design over multiple cycles.

Testing prototypes is really necessary and we can use methods such as usability testing in customer's perspective, A/B testing, user feedback and analytics. These help you to collect data and evidence that support or challenge your assumptions and user needs.

Putting prototypes in front of actual users is important for validating design decisions. Conduct usability tests where participants interact with your prototype while thinking aloud so you can understand and capture their reactions, expectations, and frustrations. Observe both their words and their actions to gain insights. Set up scenarios or tasks that address your key questions and assumptions. Aim for a mix of qualitative and quantitative feedback. Test early and often throughout the design process which will save time and money in the long run by catching issues before they become much more expensive (in dollars and in opportunity cost) to fix.

Identify clients who frequently use the existing features and represent a mix of new and long-term users. Ensure they vary in technical proficiency and business size to get diverse feedback. Here are some key questions to ask when gathering feedback: - Can you walk me through your first impression of the new feature set? - How intuitive did you find the navigation and overall design? - Were there any elements that were confusing or unclear? - What specific features did you find most useful, and why? - Were there any features you felt were missing or unnecessary? - How do you see these new features impacting your daily workflow? - Do you have any suggestions for improving the design or functionality?

To validate assumptions and user needs, I dive deep into user stories, conduct guerrilla testing, and run empathy mapping sessions. Leveraging tools like Maze for rapid user testing and Crazy Egg for heat mapping provides invaluable insights. The key is to uncover hidden motivations and pain points, refining the product iteratively for maximum impact.