The Design Thinking Process and Your Website

Design thinking is a concept that uses creativity to provide user-friendly solutions for ill-defined problems. When applied to your website, it allows our web developers to look for creative solutions to improve your customers’ experiences. People will use your website because it fits into their lives and solves a problem for them.

The design thinking process contains five steps, and each step allows our website developers to partner with you to better understand how your website design impacts your customers’ engagement.

Empathy

The first step of the process is to get to know the people who use your website. You can’t meet their needs with the service or product you offer if you don’t know what their needs are. To make a website, our web designers learn about you and the customers you serve by conducting interviews and observing the behavior of your customers. During this step, we set aside assumptions and preconceived notions.

Define

The next step is to combine the data we gathered during the empathy stage. We’ll work with you to analyze the behaviors and observations that were collected and create a clear, concise problem statement that is people-focused. We look for patterns or trends that are shared across a large percentage of your customers. This helps us understand how we might fill in gaps in the market for your particular customers.

Ideate

Now that your customers’ needs have been clearly defined, we brainstorm with you to generate ideas and solutions to meet those needs. At this stage, any and all ideas are considered. We don’t dwell on limitations. Sometimes an improbable idea will lead to a practical one that will work for your customers. This stage includes both idea generation and evaluation. After ideas are generated, we clarify them and parse them for feasibility. Then, we move to the prototype stage.

Prototype

A prototype is a realistic representation of the solution we’ve generated. We start with a paper prototype and produce a low-cost, scaled-down version of the product in order to gather feedback from your users. In this phase, we can produce multiple prototypes to gain insight into which one works best for your customers. Prototypes are tested internally before we move to the next phase.

Test

During this step, we put the prototype in front of real people and see how it works for them. At this stage, we’ll gather data by observing your customers as they interact with the prototype. This may not be the last step, though. We’ll use the information gathered here to refine the solution so that it fits your customers’ needs.

The goal of design thinking is to do the hard work up front to find a solution that meets the needs of your customers. Getting to know your customers allows our team to create a website that enhances your business. We can optimize engagement and help you remain competitive.