* Assignment A. Read the Cases section of this website, spend some time reading and looking at each example case and thinking about what characteristics they have in common.
From the case studies provided by Dr. Pullman, I find almost all case studies include some key steps in design thinking especially in Haven Self Care Meditation App UX UI Case Study and Redesigning Airbnb for the new normal — a UX case study.
- Why do we need to care about design thinking?
In the business world filled with complex and varied problems, we need to find a simple and useful way to tackle problems. The design thinking process provides a method and a unifying language for multi-disciplinary collaboration, leading to greater creativity and better solutions for problems faster.
- What is design thinking?
Design thinking was first written by a Stanford Professor named John E. Arnold in “Creative Engineering” (1959). Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving that is used to create innovative and effective solutions. It is a process that focuses on understanding the special needs and perspectives of the end users, identifying the underlying problems, and exploring and testing different solutions.
When it comes to UX design, it can help designers create products that are intuitive, engaging, and user-friendly. Design thinking in UX design involves 5 stages:
- Empathize: Learn about the end user and their specific needs, abilities, and challenges.
- Define: Pinpoint the specific problem being addressed.
- Ideate: Generate diverse ideas to address the problem.
- Prototype: Build a rough model to generate discussion and feedback in order to further refine a design.
- Test: Solicit feedback from end users.
NB： This process is meant to be a continual, cyclical process of improvement rather than a linear set of steps.
- Empathize
The first stage of design thinking is to empathize with the users. This involves understanding their needs, goals, and pain points. This includes consulting experts on the matter, engaging further into the issue to better understand the problem at hand, as well as working on the issue as a group to have a deeper comprehension of everything that is involved with the problem. The stage allows Design Thinkers to gain insight into the needs regarding the issue along with setting aside their personal assumptions regarding it. A substantial amount of information is gathered during this stage and is carried on to the next few stages to help define the problem and understand how to deal with it.
It can be done through user research, surveys, interviews, observation, and competition analysis.
- Define
The next step is to define the problem. The designers are putting together all the information they gained during the Empathize step. Essentially, they will analyze their data and put them in order to better concrete the problems. The stage will help the team gather great ideas and be able to understand how to use them effectively.
This involves framing the problem statement, setting goals, and identifying the scope of the project.
- User Persona:
It is commonplace to set up a user persona in the second step. The purpose of creating user personas is to better understand the users of a product or service. A user persona is a fictional representation of the target audience based on user research that encapsulates their goals, behaviors, motivations, and pain points. It is based on qualitative and quantitative user research, not assumptions, and can represent a segment of their target audience instead of individual users. It usually includes demographic information like age, gender, and location and conveys relevant behaviors, attitudes, and motivations. The designers usually give the persona a name and photo to make them appear realistic.
- Ideate
Design thinkers start to use the information from the previous stages to generate logical ideas. The team will start to make ideas that may be “out of the box” or perhaps just ideas that may normally skipped over when not all of the information is presented. This allows for an alternative way to solve normalized problems.
It is significant for the team to generate a lot of ideas during this stage so designers can have many to choose from when starting the next phase Prototype. By the end of this phase, the team should have a few ideas to solve the problem. This can involve brainstorming, HME Questions, sketching, and creating rough prototypes.
- HME Questions:
Sometimes, designers will use some How Might We questions to explore possibilities or potential solutions to a design problem or challenge and find the best solutions for users. They are open-ended starting structure focused on meeting user needs. Effective HME questions can help designers spark innovative ideas during the ideation phase and maintain a user-centered focus when the professionals evaluate and test design solutions.
- Wireframes
A wireframe is a basic visual representation of a website, app, or software interface. There are low-fidelity, mid-fidelity, and high-fidelity designs for the wireframe. Typically, mid-fidelity design for the wireframe involves more detailed representations of the layout, structure, and functionality of the product than low-fidelity design but with less detail and visual polish than high-fidelity designs.
- Prototype
With each new prototype, the team investigates different aspects of the problem and explores how each of the prototypes would fix the problem. By the end of this stage, the Design Thinkers should have a better understanding of the constraints that are apparent in the prototype. The prototype is a preliminary version or mockup of a product or application that is used to test and refine its design. A prototype can be created using various methods and tools, such as pen and paper sketches, digital wireframes, or interactive mockups.
- Testing
The final stage of design thinking is testing. It refers to the process of evaluating the user interface and user experience of a website, application, or other digital product to identify any usability issues, user pain points, or other areas for improvement. Even during testing, the team can and will make alterations and refinements in order to make the product more polished for their needs. Essentially, the team can continue to do this until they either solve their problem or until they are satisfied with their product.
- Usability Testing
The professionals can present findings from usability testing sessions, including user feedback, observations, and any design changes made based on the test results.
*Assignment B. Search for UX case studies and note one you find especially interesting，significant or emblematic of all cases studies. The criteria of your preference is up to you. We just want more cases to look at.
I find one UX case study that is intriguing is Anisya Firdha Khairani’s UI/UX Portfolio: ZARA Website Case Study.
Below is the link https://medium.com/@ansyfkh/ui-ux-portofolio-zara-website-dd7a783470e6.
The reason why I choose this case study is that the author has a very clear-structured analysis of her redesign. Below is the screenshot of the mindmap I made about her analysis structure in the case study of the ZARA website. In addition, I am fond of Firdha’s complete and systematic analysis of the data, which made her result more convincing. Just as she mentioned, “Before designing the prototypes, I made a solution idea, affinity diagram, prioritization idea, information architecture, user flow, and crazy 8’s.” What’s more, I am keen on her smart choice of consistency with the original design style of the company. ZARA uses basic colors for its website so her redesign style guide is not too different from the original.
*Assignment C. Based on your thinking and the outlines provided by ChatGPT and Copilot, design your own preliminary case study outline. What parts do you think are the necessary core of a case study? You might like to consult one or more of the other AIs.
My own preliminary case study outline:
- Background:
In the beginning, there should be brief background information on the product or service and the goals of the redesign.
- the client/ the user
- the industry
- the problem statement
- the goals and objectives
- User research:
This part explains how the UX designer conducted user research to understand the needs, preferences, behaviors, and pain points of the target users.
It may include methods such as
- Qualitative research:
The goal of qualitative UX research is to understand users’ needs, perspectives, values, priorities, and context and gain empathetic insights that drive design decisions. It provides the “why” behind quantitative usage data.
User interviews – One-on-one conversations with potential or current users to understand their perspectives and needs. Interviews allow designers to ask open-ended questions and probe for deeper insights.
Focus groups – Facilitated group discussions with 6-10 users. This allows observing interactions between users and how they build on each other’s ideas.
Ethnographic research – Observing people in their natural contexts, such as at home or work. This can reveal insights that users themselves may not consciously realize.
Diary studies – Asking users to record thoughts, emotions, or activities related to the product or service in a diary over time. This captures real-world behavior.
User testing – Observing users interact with prototypes to uncover usability issues and confusion areas. Moderators ask questions as users think aloud.
Surveys – Good for getting broad feedback from many users. Open-ended questions allow for qualitative data even in a quantitative method.
Analytics – User behaviors, clicks, journeys, etc. provide qualitative insights into how products are used.
Social media monitoring – Comments and conversations by users about a product reveal feedback, pain points, and needs.
Card sorting- Cards representing product content/functionality are created. Representative users sort cards into logical groups and name the groups. Researchers analyze results to reveal users’ mental models for categorizing information.
- Quantitative research
The goal of quantitative UX research is to back up design decisions with hard data-driven evidence. The numbers provide the “what” to complement the qualitative research that provides the “why”. The quantitative data delivers measurable evidence to demonstrate if designs truly meet user needs and business goals.
Usability testing – Measuring task success, completion rates, errors, and time-on-task during user testing sessions. Provides quantitative data on usability.
Surveys – Closed-ended questions answered on a numeric scale provide quantitative data on user preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and satisfaction.
Questionnaires – collecting quantitative data from many users efficiently through closed-ended questions. Effective questionnaire design includes using rating scales (e.g. 1-5, agree-disagree), multiple choice, and selecting all that apply questions.
Analytics – Event tracking and usage logs provide numerical data like page views, clicks, conversions, drop-off rates, etc. that inform UX decisions.
A/B testing – Comparing metrics like click-through rate for two variants of a design provides quantitative analysis of the better-performing option.
Eye tracking – Providing numerical heatmaps of where users look on a page and measures focus on key elements.
User interviews – This can involve numerical rating scales to gather quantitative feedback from users.
Benchmarking – Comparing user experience metrics from industry testing databases provides context and benchmarks.
Personas – Incorporating quantitative data on user demographics, stats, and behaviors makes personas more realistic
3. Ideation:
This phase describes how the UX designer generated and evaluated ideas to solve the problem.
It may include methods such as
- brainstorming
- sketching
- wireframing
A wireframe is a basic visual representation of a website, app or software interface.
- prototyping
The prototype is a preliminary version or mockup of a product or application that is used to test and refine its design. A prototype can be created using various methods and tools, such as pen and paper sketches, digital wireframes, or interactive mockups. With prototypes, designers can experiment with different layouts, features, and interactions to find the best solution for the user’s needs.
- Design:
This part presents the final design solution that was chosen after testing and feedback. It may include screenshots or mockups of the interface elements, interactions, animations, etc.
- Evaluation:
This section summarizes how the design solution was tested with real users and what results were achieved.
It may include metrics such as
- usability scores
- satisfaction ratings
- conversion rates
- Reflection:
This includes what has been learned and what challenges have been faced from the project.
- key takeaways
- limitations
- recommendations for future improvements or similar projects
From my perspective, user research is the most crucial part of a case study of UX design as it can provide some indispensable information for the following steps from the perspective of targeted users.
There are some positive effects on satisfactory user research.
First of all, great user research can help the insiders not to design just for a narrow scope of user groups. The research will showcase who are real or potential users, which might be over the expectations of designers. Secondly, the results from the user research coupled with some scientific and systematic methods can help UX professionals to avoid some biased subjective opinions and stereotypes in design. From the research, designers can know what are users’ problems and pain points, on which occasions they will use the products, or what kind of services users need. This information can provide some useful threads for thoughts on UX design in the next steps. Thirdly, good user research can help companies to save manpower, money, and material in real business.
Furthermore, if someone wants to become a wonderful UX designer, it is essential to have empathy for end users through user research. As their job is to make designs to attract users, UX professionals must understand their users thoroughly. They should build empathy for other humans who experience the product they create. In UX design, having empathy enables the designers not only to understand users’ frustration, but also to be familiar with their desires, fears, abilities (physical and emotional), limitations, reasoning, and goals. Conducting effective user research in case study can help designers fully understand their users so they can create innovative solutions for their problems as well as effectively enhance their lives.