Alignment begins with us gaining an understanding another person’s thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from our own.

Imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what they are feeling or experiencing.

It’s our goal to gain an empathic understanding of the people were designing for and the problem were trying to solve. This involves empathizing with, engaging and observing the people—our target audience—we intend to help in as many scenarios as possible.

Once we understand the challenge through the eyes of our user, we can begin to define a specific problem statement and point of view.

A great definition of our problem statement will guide our team’s work and kick start the ideation process. It will bring about clarity and focus to the design space. On the contrary, if we don’t pay enough attention to defining our problem, we will work like a person stumbling in the dark.

The insights from our Empathy phase will help us target a specific customer type/personas whom we will imagine the solution for.

Let’s start generating ideas.

The goal is to generate a large quantity of ideas — ideas that potentially inspire newer, better ideas — which the team can filter and narrow down into the best, most practical, or most innovative ideas.

Ideation should focus on one problem or challenge at a time

Team members build on each other’s responses and ideas

One of the best ways to gain insights in our process is to carry out some form of prototyping.

This method involves producing an early, inexpensive, and scaled down version of the product in order to reveal any problems with the current design.

Prototyping offers us the opportunity to bring clients ideas to life, test the practicability of the current design, and to potentially investigate how a sample of users think and feel about a product.

We want early results so we follow the RITE Method (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) for testing our solutions. Once the data for a participant has been collected the usability engineer and team decide if they will be making any changes to the prototype prior to the next participant. This enables us to adjust quickly while staying Lean.