Acing "Design Thinking Mindset" – a building block for creating great Products

If you are in the Product world, be that a physical product or a digital product design, Design Thinking has become a key foundational element.

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In the past, we have seen & used many products that were probably not very user-friendly or did not provide a good experience. Remember the old generation televisions – for changing channels you have to get up from your sofa & walk up to the TV set each time. Such an irritating experience or simply stick to one particular channel even in the commercial break slot. Or, maybe you would remember the school day’s wooden rulers – not good for drawing a straight line with precision, but only good for leaving solid red marks on your back after being beaten by your teachers or parents (thank God my daughter has plastic rulers now ??). Or, probably the first generation Windows computers – every time you start the system it would take at least five to ten minutes to become operational.

These products were accepted by users at that time because the users had limited needs at that time. There was no fierce competition, not much advancement in technology, and in essence not an abundance of options for the users. So people were forced to use whatever things were available in the market whether this gives a good experience or not. That was a generation of Need-based Consumption.

Now in this century, especially post-2010, we have landed onto a completely different era. Now we do not buy products just because we need them, but we choose a product based on Experience. That is why Design Thinking has become an essential part of Product Design & Product management for today’s Experience-based Product Consumption behavior.

Before I go further in Design Thinking – let us quickly talk about what is User Experience (UX). In layman’s terms, UX is nothing but how a user feels when he interacts with your product. It is not only the core value, but the Holistic Experience that the user gets by using the product.

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With every passing day the market is becoming so crowded with thousands of alternatives for each product with almost similar core values, the product makers are counting on creating a differential User Experience using the Design Thinking approach, to take a leap in the race.

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A good design thinking process focuses on how I can make sure that the users can understand & access the desired functionalities in the easiest & quickest manner and get a feeling of joy/delight while using the product. ?Every product has some core value proposition – which is obviously taken care of in the Utility Layer, but on top of that, there has to be an Experience Layer that gives your product an edge.

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Design thinking is not a linear motion problem of just reaching point A to point B – rather it is a convoluted & iterative approach to creating a perfect UX for your product. At the heart of Design Thinking is the human-centric approach. Product Managers & designers must see the world from the user’s eye, understand their emotions, feelings, liking-disliking, and then design the product accordingly.

Fundamentally good product design takes care of not only the visual layer (which the user generally sees) but also the hidden layers of the iceberg (which augments the differential experience). I have borrowed this concept from The UX Iceberg by Dan Olsen?https://twitter.com/danolsen who has beautifully explained this.

In the Conceptual Design layer, which is the foundation of the UX pyramid, a Product Designer thinks about the core conceptual value that he wants to deliver to the users through his product. Let’s take an example of a Payment app – which is designed to convey the core value of effortless, digital payment transactions by the user using his smartphone, either P2P (Peer-to-Peer) or P2M (Peer-to-Merchant)

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Then comes the Information Architecture, in which the product designer thinks & decides what information to show to the user at what level, how this information should be shown to the user, at what position the information should be presented on a product page etc. so that it can be easily consumed and there is no cognitive overloading for the user. Taking the same example of a payment app – You will see the Scan & Pay option at the top section of any payment app, which is where the user can most easily access the most frequent function of the app. Or, maybe when you tap on the scan/ pay button, along with the QR scan window it also gives a secondary option to enter your mobile number. This means, somebody has thought that if the QR does not work, the user can key in the mobile number on the same screen without going back.

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Third comes the Interaction Design layer – In this layer, the Product designer decides how the User will interact with the elements of the product, what kind of interactive operation (click, swipe, rotate, etc.), how many steps the user needs to take to complete the task, etc. Let’s say for PIN-less transactions, simply after the QR scan user needs to swipe & pay. ?That is a seamless, fully intuitive & immersive payment experience for the user.

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And at the last layer comes the Visual Design – overall look & feel, theme, color, font, size, etc. visual elements – which gives a feel-good factor to the user and a soothing usage experience. A combination of all layers of UX pyramids helps a Product Manager to design a good UX-centric product.

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There is a standard 6-step process in the Design Thinking approach –

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Empathy – To start with design thinking, you must empathize with the users for whom you are designing the product. Of course, before that, you need to identify the target user segment & the ideal user persona. A product manager needs to deep dive into the ideal user’s lifestyle, their liking-disliking, needs & wishes, their demographic & psychographic profile, their emotions & feelings, and a lot more. PM & UX designers need to talk to users to extract the hidden expectation & the real pain points.

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Define – Once you empathize with the user, you need to define what are the exact requirements that are to be taken care of in your product. E.g., if you are building an online mobile pharmacy app you need to consider that an old age person could be one persona type for you, who may be proficient in tech but may have bad eyesight. So, in such application, you need to follow Minimalistic Design (i.e. minimum steps to place an order), the interactions should be very easy with just simple clicks, and the color/ font, etc. should be easily visible by elderlies.

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Ideate – Once you define the design requirements, the PM along with the product & UI/UX design team needs to ideate the potential solutions, brainstorm the different ways to put that idea into reality, and evaluate the pros/ cons of each solution.

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Prototype – In the fourth step, create a prototype, the low fidelity design like hand sketches, wireframes, etc., and then a more detailed high-fidelity design like screen design & functional prototypes, which exactly replicate the actual product.

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Test – Then take your design to the real users, get them to use this, and give their feedback. Capture their viewpoint, their experiences, the issues they are facing while using the prototype, etc.

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Iterate & Implement – After each prototype testing PM needs to go through an iterative cycle until the users seem completely satisfied and all their feedback are taken care of. Then you start the implementation and final development process of the product.

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Design Thinking is essential for any successful product development. This is an art every product manager & UX designer needs to imbibe to create a differentiated user experience and not just provide a core functionality through your products.

#productdesign #productmanagement #digitalproduct #UI #UX #designthinking #usercentricdesign #userexperience

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Refer to my previous articles on Product Management, the ideal way to start a Product design journey & the concept of Product-Market fit.