So, what is digital design as it self?

Design is an activity that provides solutions to a specific problem. In case if we are talking about digital design or in fact about user experience design, we face the need to understand the customers` requirements and problem-solving ways. So, what I do at work every day is just creating a new ‘painkiller’or ‘antidote’ for someone who needs it, isn’t it? For example, customer needs a more common registration form, and here I am as a designer with an understanding of why end-users need it and what is the reason of redesigning an existing registration form, at what stage users leave the form, and what is the most painful field at which they spend lots of time during filling it. It’s a brief compilation of painkiller activities, and the antidote challenges are like these — “Could you please, do something to take users into the system without any registration, but it’s important from a business perspective to collect their e-mails and some personal data…” You see, the design depends on understanding the customers’ requirements, business values, and users’ goals. And all above I’ve described is a quite complicated flow, stream or process if you want. It needs to be structured and organized. Incidentally, the design process is just only a small part of the whole development process. And all the text below will describe the basics of the design process.

Design process by the Design Thinking

Nowadays a lot of methodologies about design process exist and I’m inclined to use in my practices one that is called “Design Thinking”. This method was founded by Herbert Simon in 1969 and mentioned in the book “The Sciences of the Artificial” and the most incredible is that after fifty years, the foundations of this methodology lie in the designing of any digital product. Sure, it has taken some changes, but it is still on top when we are talking about setting up processes at the design department or even just in the product/project team. So, what are the anchors of this theory? Here they are: empathizing, defining, ideation, prototyping, and testing. All the mentioned steps are the way to make design according to the business values, product goals, and users’ needs, but not only according to a designer’s opinion or vision.

Empathy

The “Empathy” phase is the area where the design team learns customer’s domain, current market situation, and general purpose of a product of how it is going to grow and what directions it follows, future goals and targets, current audience and lots more. The understanding of all of these things is a straightforward way to be on the same page with a customer, and it could become the remedy for productive business relations.

Define

The next phase is “Define”, which will point the way of what exactly needs to be designed, what problem should be solved and how to cover business, users, and product’s needs, values and requirements — some kind of the summary of the previous step.

Ideate

Finally, we know what we should do, but it’s still the question of how we are going to reach our goals. The approaches which should be used were determined in the “Ideate” phase. It is time for generating tone of ideas, brainstorming and finding many possible solutions to cover all discovered issues during previous steps. Done.

Prototype

Now tasks are clear, estimations have been provided, timestamps have been committed and seems like we are on the “Prototype” phase. Probably the most exciting phase in the design process. Now it’s all about software and rectangles, wireframes and mock-data, reviewing’s and edits, discussions, and negotiations, approves and declines, syncs, dailies, status updates and more… and the main goal of this is the final result that could be implemented by developers team and tested by end-users.