Think Like A Designer
When you think of a graphic designer, a few words and character traits may come to mind. These may include creative, patient, or artistic- this is the common perception of graphic designers. Coming from a design writer background myself, I can confirm that these traits make up a large majority of the people and the work that we do. However, a huge piece that most people miss is problem-solver.
Graphic designers are tasked every day to solve problems through the work of their designs. This type of work requires much more than simple artistic abilities. In fact, let me introduce you to the design thinking process: a necessary tool to understand how designers go from nothing to a brand-new prototyped design.
Design Thinking Process
The design thinking process is the process in which designers can solve problems and come to real-world solutions. Design thinking is non-linear and can have anywhere from 3-7 steps. However, we re going to focus on the main 5 steps in the image above.
Empathize
The first step in this process is to level with your client/audience or whoever is experiencing this problem. This requires you to research your user’s needs thoroughly. Research can include speaking to experts, conducting observations, and heavily following the user experience to learn more about it. It’s important to empathize with your users because this is how you will be able to fully understand their position in order fully understand how to create an effective solution. If you don’t understand where the user is coming from, you will never be able to fully help them.
2. Define
Once you’ve empathized with the user, it’s time to define the problem. Now you can take a look at what the issue is based on the research you collected in the first stage. Given that there may be more than one problem, in this step it’s important to only narrow it down to one problem because too many may get too messy when creating a solution. Additionally, when identifying the problem, you’ll want to focus the problem statement around the user’s needs.
For example, a good problem statement would be:
“Elderly men and women need to exercise at least once a day in order to ensure their muscles are strong and healthy.
A bad problem statement would be:
“We need to increase the number of exercise machines we sell to elderly people”
The second problem statement has no care for the user’s needs and therefore contradicts the empathizing step altogether. Therefore, it’s important to take your time when defining the problem to ensure you’re listening to the user's needs and helping them.
3. Ideate
After completing the research and identifying the problem, designers can now begin to generate some ideas. Based on your findings from the last two steps, designers can sketch and make note of as many ideas as they have. Plus, there are a number of different ideation techniques that designers can use, these include: Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea, SCAMPER, and Brainwrite.
One interesting technique, Worst Possible Idea, is an inverted technique where designers purposefully pick the worst possible ideas they can think of. This search process is supposed to relax them, boost their confidence, and challenge their assumptions on what the best idea could be.
Each of these techniques works with the idea of letting designers think freely to come up with any ideas in this stage.
4. Prototype
Courtesy: Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design
Based on the ideas that the designers reached in the last step, now it’s time to bring those ideas to life. This means creating inexpensive, scaled-down versions of a select few of the best ideas to discover which prototype presents the best solution. This stage will allow designers to see what their design looks like in real life (on a smaller scale) and generate solutions around it. By the end of this stage, the designer should have a better understanding of how the users would interact with the prototyped product based on their experience.
5. Test
Lastly, the final step is to test out the product using the best solutions found in the previous stage. You’ll be looking to test out factors such as functionality, efficiency, design, and whether or not this design solves the problem at hand. While this is the last step in the process, it’s common for some designers to have to keep editing and fixing their design and go back a few steps before being satisfied with the final product.
Overall, the design thinking process outlines an easy way for designers to understand what their users need and follow the best steps to give them the best solution they can.