Design is a crucial and often ignored element for every website. Digital marketing companies with a design thinking approach will always put the audience at the centre of website creation. Design thinking involves moving ahead of UX and competitiveness to having a human-centred approach. Website developers who empathise with their users will create sites with innovative, user-friendly designs and not just incremental improvements.
Design thinking starts with ideation and goes on until the attainment of the goals. A good design will provide feedback and indicate the scope of improvement if necessary. Using this process, website designers will effectively solve the users’ problems rather than focus on its visual aspects. There are five simple steps to implementing design thinking for website creation.
Step 1: Empathise with The Customers
Empathy or a human-centred approach to design is all about understanding your customers better. The most crucial tool for empathising is customer interactions, active listening to their pain points, and understanding what they want. Detailed customer personas, journey maps, and empathy maps are useful at this stage to understand the customer better. After gathering all the information regarding the customer, it is upon the website designer to incorporate their findings into the structural frameworks’.
Step 2: Define the Problems
The website designers need to identify the customer pain points that the website will address at this stage. Once there is a clear understanding of users’ expectations from the website, the designers put their heart into analysing and defining the problems. This stage might require brainstorming and detailed discussions with users. Custodians from various departments, i.e., customer service, sales, marketing, and service delivery, should be a part of the debate. Segregate all problems into three parts, problems you have already accounted for, problems that need immediate attention and problems that are not significant.
Step 3: Ideate Solutions to the Problems
At this stage, the creative muscle of the website designers comes to play. Keeping the design thinking approach, they need to develop innovative, functional and appealing design ideas to solve customer problems. The human-centric design should be the guiding factor for all UX elements. It is best to note all the viewpoints, zero down on the best ideas, and eliminate the ideas that do not add value to your customers. Have a user-centric approach in all aspects of your website, right from tonality to graphics and navigation.
Step 4: Create Prototype
Prototype creation refers to making a scaled-down version of the website that caters to all the problem areas of the users you wish to address. Prototypes need not be detailed, so there is no need to spend much time on them; it is okay to make mistakes at this stage. The sooner the prototype gets ready, the faster you will put it for testing and open it for feedback. A prototype is equivalent to a test model. The prototype should be practical; it should work seamlessly across all channels, devices, various digital touchpoints and browsers.
Step 5: Testing Phase
Once the prototype is ready, the final test stage begins; at this stage, the designers start collecting valuable feedback from sample users explaining their experience. The test stage allows website developers to interact with their end-users, creating a final website relatable to the end-users. Testing could be the final stage, but it is also the most tiresome as you have to keep incorporating the suggestions and testing them to reach the final result
Conclusion
Design thinking is about designing a website with a strong brand personality to attract users while having all the essential elements for the site to be functional. It is a systematic approach towards discovering the concerns of the end-users, defining the problem, making a rough sketch or model of the project, putting it for testing before coming with the result that appeals to the customers and brings conversions for the business.