Empathize, Define, Ideate: Using Design Thinking in Mobile App Development

Design thinking is not only an ideology, but also a process that enables the creation of successful products tailored to the user. In this article, we'll look at how to apply design thinking to mobile app development and what benefits it brings based on our experience.

We've probably all encountered a product or service that didn't meet our needs, or tried to solve our problems in less than ideal ways. The reason for this may be the lack of design thinking - or that the developers of the solution did not think about the users who will use the product and their needs.

What is Design Thinking

Design Thinking is the ideology of a user-centered approach to a problem. That's enough for a basic definition, look no further.

However, design thinking also refers to the process of designing solutions and products, in this case mobile apps, that are as customer-oriented as possible.

Most products and solutions based on design thinking start with a well-asked question, such as, "How can we give people ordering food through a mobile app more confidence that their order will arrive on time?"

The key in design thinking is to understand the problems of users, people, simply your target audience. Then, look for solutions to those problems and then apply those solutions in a way that best suits your target group (here again, it's important to "empathize" with your target group and understand how they behave).

The process of using design thinking itself is usually broken down into five basic steps, popularized by the design company IDEO and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University (d.school).

Using Design Thinking in Mobile App Development

Empathize

The first step of design thinking is to understand the problem you want to solve with your mobile app. This phase is crucial. At the very beginning, it's important to empathize with the users who will be using the mobile app. Methods such as interviews, observations, personas, or surveys can be very helpful in this regard.

Define

At this stage, you need to clearly define the problem itself using the information you gathered in the "empathy" stage. It is possible that you will discover more than one way to innovate and solve the problem, in which case it is a good idea to start with the solution that you see the most benefit in. Of course, you can choose to solve more than one problem, it's up to you.

Ideate

Once you've understood your users and defined the problem, it's time to start thinking creatively, i.e. 'outside the box', and generate as many ideas as possible to solve the problem. At this stage, it's a good idea to brainstorm, prototype, create concepts, mind maps or wireframes - in short, try different techniques for generating and visualising ideas. Encourage divergent thinking and avoid judging ideas too early.

Prototype

Now it's time to create working prototypes of the mobile app or individual features (if you didn't create them in the previous phase) and experiment. With prototypes, it's important that they are as close as possible to what you defined in the previous phases and that the core features represent the final product. They can be simple, but they must be functional.

Test

With a working mobile app prototype comes the important part of the whole process - testing the prototype. There are many ways to test, but the most important thing is to test how users (your target audience) react to the product, how well the app solves the problem and how well it meets the users' needs. User feedback is key in this case.

During testing, you may come across insights that take you back to previous steps - that's okay, it's part of design thinking.

What's next?

If your test is successful and you have developed a product that reliably solves the user's problem and meets their needs, you're halfway there. However, it's likely that the test will reveal flaws or an overall poor execution of the solution, and you'll have to go back a few steps. After all, design thinking is not a linear process: it's often complicated and erratic, and to gain a deep understanding of the problem at hand, it makes sense to jump between phases and iterate the process.

Design Thinking and Our Projects

Shifter Mobile App

Shifter is our own mobile app that works like a shift calendar. We came up with the idea for this solution thanks to design thinking. It started with a simple question: "How can employees have an intuitive overview of their shifts?"

At the time of Shifter's development, there were already a number of shift calendar apps on the market, but they had one thing in common - they required the user to manually click and select upcoming shifts and cycles. Thanks to design thinking, we discovered that this process was too complicated for many users, so we decided to come up with our own solution - the Shifter mobile app. Instead of manually entering shifts and cycles, our app works with its own database of shifts, making setup as simple and intuitive as possible for users. Just enter a name, select a company and a shift and you're done.

During development, we focused on a user-centric approach, which helped us to discover the main need of the app users - to have a simple and intuitive solution for shift overview on their mobile phone. In addition, design thinking inspired us to incorporate the now very popular feature of adding shifts of friends or family members, which users appreciate especially when planning joint events.

The Shifter app has over 200k downloads and a 95% rating based on over 6k user reviews as of the date of this article.

If you want to discover more about Shifter, read the article or case study .

Conclusion

We hope that this article has helped you understand design thinking and brought you closer to the possibilities of using it in the development of mobile apps or other products. Remember that design thinking is not a linear process. Feel free to start with just one phase of the process and gradually explore and test the usefulness of the product before its final launch. Don't be afraid to experiment and customize the process to fit your unique needs.

Do you want to implement design thinking in mobile app development? At iDevBand, we combine design thinking with our years of experience to develop mobile apps that truly resonate with users. Get in touch to find out how we can help turn your ideas into a successful mobile app.