DESIGN THINKING APPROACH: A food ordering app design thinking process
Companies and teams are faced with different problems and in order to solve these problems, design thinking must be applied. Design thinking is a process that can be adopted by anybody, you do not necessarily have to be a designer or a design agency to apply design thinking in solving solutions. However, design thinking focuses on humans and users generally. It is a human centered approach that focuses on the users and builds a solution based on the users experience and need
A food company (an eatery) has reached out to my team to design an application that would allow its users order food online easily. How do I create a solution? Using a non linear design thinking approach, here is how I intend to create a solution.
First, I’ll EMPATHIZE. This is the first stage of my design thinking process. I’ll need to put myself in the position of the users. How do I do this? I need to gain an empathic understanding of the users experiences so I’ll carry out a survey and also a few interviews with customers and prospective customers. I will also have to interview people of different occupations and age group who love food or purchase food from eateries to understand what their experience is like, their motivations and frustrations. This will help me understand who my users are, my target audience and what the problem is. From this also, I’ll be able to come up with user stories and a persona(s) to help me understand the users and the problem.
Then I’ll move to the next stage which is the DEFINE THE PROBLEM stage. From the information I gathered in the previous stage, I would be able to understand and identify the main problem(s). For example, some users get very busy that they are unable to go to the eatery to buy food to eat, some find it stressful or shy going to the eatery to buy food. Some probably have been using a particular app and find it difficult to navigate, place orders easily or can’t seem to find a particular feature they would love to have.
IDEATE. In this stage, the team will brainstorm and come up with different ideas on how the product or app should look like, the possible features that can be included in the app. In this stage the team will come up with lots of ideas and suggestions that will be noted down. This stage mainly involves team discussion and brainstorming activities with the team. From this we will come up with a flow chart or user flow to help us create a better solution.
PROTOTYPE. In this stage, the numerous ideas listed in previous stage will be narrowed down. The most realistic ideas will be selected and used to develop testable low fidelity models or designs. These low fidelity designs will be tested before they are developed into high fidelity designs which will also go through user testing.
The final stage is the TESTING stage. In this stage, the prototype will be given to a few users and other colleagues to test while we watch and try to understand their whole process of using the app and their experience. We would try to understand if the users can carry out their tasks from start to finish seamlessly. This stage will also help us know if the products solves the users problem and helps them complete tasks easily.
CONCLUSION: Design thinking helps us understand a problem from the users point of view and also build solutions to solves users problems. With these stages explained, a solution can be created based on the users needs and experiences so as to come up with a solution to help users order food seamlessly and improve the general sales and revenue of the company.
