Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving that focuses on understanding the user’s needs and redefining problems to develop innovative solutions. It involves a series of steps to address complex challenges and create user-centric solutions, including product design, service design, and business strategy.

Proposed Case Study Outline

For the case study I plan to do, the outline will follow the ‘Design Thinking’ principles and comprise five stages, each with unique activities to achieve specific goals.

Empathize: In this stage, the focus is on understanding the needs, pain points, and motivations of the end-users. The goal is to put the user at the center of the design process and generate empathy towards their experiences. The activities in this stage include:

• User Research
• Interviews with users 
• Competitive Analysis

Define: Based on the insights gained from the previous stage, this stage’s goal is to define the problem or challenge clearly. The activities in this stage include:

• Articulate user needs, insights, and pain points
• Formulate the problem
• Create Personas
• Building Empathy Map

Ideate: This stage is about generating creative solutions to the defined problem. The focus is on generating as many ideas as possible and selecting the most suitable ones for further development. 

• Create solutions
• Come up with User Journeys
• Building the Information Architecture

Prototype: This stage involves developing tangible representations of the selected ideas. The primary goal is to test the ideas and gather feedback to improve the solutions. The activities in this stage include:

• Create Paper prototype
• Build Wireframes
• Recommend style guide
• Create final design

Test: In this stage, the emphasis is gathering user feedback on the prototypes developed in the previous stage. The goal is to refine and improve the solutions based on the feedback received. The activities in this stage include:

• Conduct usability testing
• Collect feedback
• Iterate on the design and make necessary adjustments.
• Implement the iterated design

The case studies that were assigned for review were all unique, but one particular case study that is aligned with my thinking is Muskan Attri’s Haven Self-Care Meditation App. It describes the process in the five similar steps above.

Interesting Case Study

In his case study, Arvind describes the problem and possible solutions for the users. The solution is explained step by step to make the user journey easy. Qualitative and Quantitative Research has been supplemented with interview questions, answers, and pie charts. It provides a robust foundation for user-centered problem-solving. The Competitive Analysis taken into account by Arvind helps to understand the product’s market positioning comprehensively and identify opportunities for refinement and innovation. 

In the ideate stage, the information architectures component helps create frameworks or mind maps that visualize relationships between concepts and potential solutions. This allows designers to determine how users will navigate through a system, thus ensuring a seamless and user-friendly experience.

Next, the Wireframe feature is an interesting add-on that allows designers to establish the information hierarchy by indicating the placement and prioritization of different elements on the screen. The clean and simple home screen design is what the user wants so that they can easily locate the options and place an order without any hassle. The search page is simple yet very effective. It has features like Search History, trending searches, offers, and promotions to make the shopping experience easy and enjoyable. One feature that I found interesting was that the important details of the product are displayed along with user ratings. 

Arvind’s Case Study is a good example of a UX Case Study. It has offered pertinent information I think I will consider as I start to research and work on my UX Case Study.