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UX Design Process

Week four

Understand design ideation

Design ideation is the process of generating a broad set of ideas on a given topic without judging or evaluating them. When you start thinking of ideas, you want to come up with as many as possible.

Preparing for ideation

Empathize with your user. Empathizing is the first step in the design process. You need to know who you’re solving for and what their needs are. You empathized with your user already by creating empathy maps, personas, user stories, and user journey maps.

Define the problem. Defining is the second step in the design process. The problem you’re trying to solve should be well-defined, so that everyone on your team can think of ideas to solve the same problem. Knowing exactly what problem you need to solve will also keep your users’ needs top-of-mind.

Establish a creative environment. You’ll need a comfortable space where everyone on your team can get together and present their ideas. If you’re meeting in person, choose an ideation space that’s different from your usual workspace. If you’re ideating virtually, try to find a different space in your home that’s free of clutter and distractions.

Set a time limit. There are an endless number of possible products and features you could design, so give yourself plenty of time to come up with ideas. However, you can’t brainstorm forever, so you’ll also need to set a time to stop brainstorming and start thinking more deeply about the ideas you’ve come up with.

Assemble a diverse team. You’re trying to come up with as many different ideas as possible. An inclusive team of people, with different races, genders, abilities, and backgrounds, will help you come up with all kinds of solutions.

Think outside the box. Don’t limit yourself to traditional ideas and solutions. If you have a cool idea that seems a little different, write it down! Think big and get creative while ideating.

Design ideation encourages you to come up with solutions that are unique. Don’t settle for your first solution. In fact, the first few solutions you suggest are often the least creative because they’re the most obvious. When generating ideas, you should use your creative powers to their full potential.

Competitive audit

A competitive audit is an overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing the brands and products of competitors, or the companies who offer similar products as you do, can give you a well-rounded foundation of knowledge about the market your product will enter.

Direct competitors are companies that have offerings similar to your product and focus on the same audience. Indirect competitors can have a similar set of offerings and a different audience, or a different set of offerings with the same audience.

Why are competitive audits important?

Competitive audits can offer many benefits throughout your ideation phase, including:

Giving you an idea of products already in the market and their designs.

Suggesting ideas to solve early problems that you’re facing with your own designs.

Revealing the ways that current products in the market are not meeting users’ needs. This is a gap for your product to address!

Demonstrating the expected life cycle of a product in the same market as yours.

Informing all the different iterations your product could take and how those performed for your competitors.

With these benefits in mind, you can work with your team to identify the features and qualifications that you think are vital to your product.

Competitive audit steps:

Step 1. Outline the audit goals

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Using consistent language for rating competitor products can also create more uniform feedback and help you “grade” competitors. You can grade competitors on a scale of:

Needs work: The app is not usable, and users aren’t getting what they need from this aspect of the app.

Okay: This aspect has some issues, but with some work, it could meet user needs.

Good: This aspect works well, but doesn’t always provide users with the necessary information easily.

Outstanding: This aspect feels consistent, and it meets or exceeds the user’s needs.

Step 2. List competitors

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First, ask the company or team who they consider to be their direct and indirect competitors. As a reminder, direct competitors have offerings that are similar to your product and focus on the same audience. Indirect competitors either have a similar set of offerings but focus on a different audience, or they have a different set of offerings and focus on the same audience.

Step 3. Determine the specific competitor aspects you want to compare

First impressions: Check out the website on both desktop and mobile devices, and make note of your first impressions. Is the website responsive, meaning that it resizes across devices? Does the design complement the product? How do you feel about the website?

Interaction: Explore the user flow and navigation of the website. What features are available for users? Is the website accessible to all users, including those using screen readers? How inclusive is their website to non-English speakers? Will the user get confused as they click through the website pages, or is the navigation clear?

Visual design: Review competitor branding and their overall consistency. Does the website appear and feel the same throughout all sections and pages? Does the branding match the intended audience? Is the imagery and color palette memorable?

Content: Examine the written content included on the website. Does the tone of the content match the company’s branding? Will users be able to find the details they’re interested in?

Step 4. Research each company

You can include notes in bullet point form, links, and screenshots—whatever is most helpful for your information gathering process! Let’s check out each section of the example spreadsheet.

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Step 5. Summarize your findings in a report

After conducting research, gathering data, and analyzing your findings, summarize your work in a report. What you include in your report and how you present your findings will vary depending on the audit goals you outlined at the beginning of the process.

An effective competitive audit should:

Identify your key competitors

Review the products that your competitors offer

Understand how your competitors position themselves in the market

Examine what your competition does well and what they could do better

Consider how your competitors describe themselves

An effective competitive audit can help:

Inform your design process

Solve usability and accessibility problems

Reveal gaps in the market

Provide reliable evidence about whether designs work or not

Save time, money, and energy

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Tips for your slides and presentation structure

Every good presentation needs an introduction, so you’ll want to begin by laying out the goals of your competitive audit. It’s also a good idea to outline your research questions, methodology, and the features or characteristics you compared across competitors. Summarizing the purpose of your presentation makes it clear exactly what you're trying to learn about the competition. Note that the example introductory slide below includes sections for an objective, research questions, and procedures.

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Next, summarize what you learned about your competitors’ products, and how they compare to yours. Be sure to point out where your product excels, as well as areas that need improvement.

As you organize your presentation, think about the most effective ways to present your insights. Keep the overall design as simple and clean as possible. Avoiding cluttered and confusing imagery makes it easier for your audience to follow along and focus on the important information. Note how the example slide below outlines the most important information and expands on it in the section to the left:

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Get feedback from your team. Share your report or slides with a trusted teammate ahead of time to get their take on how the information flows.

Limit the amount of text on your slides. Your slides should include just enough information to draw attention to important points. Save the details for your speech.

Stick to the highlights. A presentation to your team or client should only focus on the highlights of your audit. If you want to get into more detail, add them to the appendix of your presentation or create a written report.

Use notes. An outline or note cards can help you stay focused, on topic, and on time.

Practice ahead of time. Do a few trial runs before the big day to get comfortable with the content and pace of your presentation.

Use relevant graphics. Make sure any images and graphics relate directly to the topic of your presentation. Choose images and graphics carefully to ensure they enhance clarity.

Keep your biases in check. Be aware of your own design biases and try to prevent them from clouding your judgment during the presentation.

Be able to defend your conclusions. Make sure you have evidence to back up your conclusions. Use actual data and specific examples whenever possible.

Brainstorm design ideas by sketching

“How might we” (HMW) is a design thinking activity used to translate problems into opportunities for design.

Frame HMW questions

To create good HMW questions, you need a well-defined problem statement. From there, you can reframe this problem statement into questions that will help you come up with ideas to solve the problem.

Consider this problem that a user, Darren, faces: Darren is a concert goer who needs to keep track of their concert ticket because they need the ticket when they go through security.

Let’s revisit those useful tips from the Stanford University design school that you learned about in the video. These tips will help you reframe the problem from different angles.

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Think of how you might use any positives in the problem as a solution.

How might we make keeping track of tickets a fun competition among friends?

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Think of how you’d solve the opposite of the problem you’ve outlined.

How might we create a way to lose tickets?

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Think of ways to completely change the process.

How might we make a non-paper concert ticket?

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This is especially helpful for long, complex problems.

How might we keep the customer’s ticket from getting lost? How might we make a lost ticket easier for the security team to handle?

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Think of how to remove the negative part of the problem entirely.

How might we make a way for concert goers to enter a venue without needing a ticket?

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Take any negative adjectives and try to turn them into positives.

How might we make the entry to a concert venue less stressful for ticket holders?

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Remove or change any processes that you assume have to be in place.

How might we remove the security check process at a concert?

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Think of ways to compare this user experience to another experience.

How might we make going through security like playing a video game?

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Think of how the problem might be solved by a resource that isn’t mentioned in the problem statement.

How might facial recognition software help manage concert entry?

If you want more inspiration, check out Stanford’s

one-pager on “how might we” questions⁠

Best practices for thinking of HMWs

Coming up with good HMWs takes a little practice, but you’ll get the hang of it in no time! Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

Be broad. A good HMW should allow for multiple solutions. For example, one of the earlier questions, How might we make keeping track of tickets fun and competitive?, can be answered in countless ways.

But don’t be too broad. You want your HMWs to be comprehensive, but narrow enough to keep your solutions focused. An example of a HMW question that is too broad is: How might we make ticketing better? This HMW doesn’t provide clear enough guidance to come up with ideas for solutions.

Make multiple drafts. It’s okay to change your HMW questions after you’ve written them. If you find that your HMW doesn’t help you think of any useful solutions, change it up!

Be creative. HMWs are meant to be imaginative and even fun. You can use the list of tips from Stanford above to think of new, creative ways to frame your questions.

Write as many HMWs as you can. The more HMWs you have, the more solutions you can come up with. If you can make more than one question out of the frameworks you’ve learned, then go for it!

Crazy Eights is a great way to get ideas flowing for any design problem you need to solve. With Crazy Eights, you’ll sketch eight different designs, each with a new idea for solving the user’s problem. The best part? It only takes eight minutes! Here’s a reminder of how it works:

Start with a large sheet of paper. Fold the paper in half, then fold it in half again, then in half one more time. When you unfold the paper, you’ll have eight squares to sketch in.

Grab something to draw with. A lot of designers prefer to draw using Sharpies, but a pencil or pen will work too. You can use whatever you already have to draw.

Set your timer to eight minutes. You’ll have one minute to sketch each design idea.

Let the ideas flow. Draw any and every solution that comes to your mind. If you have more than eight ideas, feel free to repeat the exercise.

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Crazy Eights is an exciting design ideation exercise that generates a lot of ideas in a small amount of time. If you have five people do the exercise at the same time, you’ll have 40 potential solutions after only eight minutes. That’s a lot of ideas!

Crazy Eights also forces you to think outside the box because you have to come up with many ideas in a short timeframe, without judging them. This means that you will have lots of unique, nontraditional solutions to consider.

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Glossary week 4⁠

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