Process

Understand [Discovery phase]

It is crucial to understand the context you're working with. It's important to get to know the target group and their needs and problems. This can be done in variety of ways from analyzing the data you already have (analytics, stakeholder interviews, customer complaints,...) , looking at the market and competition and conducting own research (for example interviews, journey maps, testing, etc.)

Define the problem

With insights from data, research and empathy behind us, we can synthetize what we gathered. This involves piecing all the puzzles together to form a coherent picture. We organize, interpret and make sense of all the data we gathered. This helps us to define the problem that we will work on. We form our hypothesis.

Create Solution

With a clearly defined problem we can start brainstorming and coming up with potential solutions. Then we select couple based on business goals, technical feasibility and how well it meets the needs of our target group. These are our assumptions that we have to test. Therefore, we create prototypes and tests in appropriate form and complexity. An example of a prototype can be a Story board, card sorting test,  simple black and white (lo-fi) wireframe or something that represents the final solution more closely - high fidelity prototype.

Validate

With our prototypes in hand, we head out to test and validate our assumptions. We perform a user test with our target group and gather extra feedback and information which we can use for improvements or to get back to the first stage.

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Though we don't test just if something is usable.

We're testing for:

• desireability - do people want it?
• feasability - is it technically possible?
• Viability - is the business model self-sustaining?