The importance of design is now being recognized across the globe. Products look better than ever, interfaces seem more intuitive, and businesses are employing designers at a higher pace than ever before, yet the designer’s job has shifted in recent years.

It’s no longer enough to iterate and understand your user; instead, in today’s world, designers should be able to do both, identify problems, and build solutions, increasing their worth by at least 10 times for any company matter.

When you can do both, you will accomplish things that no one else can, making you a valuable addition to your company. There is a movement taking on in big companies bringing design much closer to the company's heart. However, the change isn’t about aesthetics; it’s about using design principles to improve the user experience. This new approach is largely our response to the increasing complexity of modern technology and modern businesses.

Accenture, Capital One, and Deloitte have acquired more than 71 independent design firms since 2004, with 50 of those multimillion-dollar talent acquisitions occurring in the last two years. Meanwhile, business schools, beginning with the Yale School of Management, have started to include design courses into their core curriculum. Companies such as McKinsey and IBM have elevated designers to the highest levels of management, recognizing that design has already proved itself in many ways.

If you were around during the late 1990s dot-com craze, you might think of designers as 20 something shooting Nerf darts across an office that looks more like a bar because the design has historically been equated with aesthetics and craft; designers have been celebrated as artistic savants. Today, however, the most effective designer will be the one who can choose suitable colors, anesthetics, layouts, and patterns and deal with intangible materials, code, words, and voice. This allows them to create products that are continuously changing and affect millions of people’s lives.

As the line between engineering, writing, and design blurs, technology's importance will only become more entrenched in the product development process. Most people don’t think about how poorly designed everyday interactions are until they learn good design and user experience principles, many of which are not intuitive. You don’t need to be born thinking about this stuff to become a successful designer; it’s a skill that can be developed like anything else. Passion often follows from knowledge and expertise.

In this article, I have explained the entire design process, creating an amazing user experience when integrated into your product. You will also learn to approach the problem systematically. Working in a series is the most important stage of the design process. The ability to experiment, value, and learn from mistakes and build on the experience achieved is the hallmark of the truly successful and creative individual.

What design actually means?

If I have to define design, I would say that it creates a plan to construct an object or a system using human interaction elements like drawing, painting, diagrams, prototypes, etc., or sometimes even sculptures. But the hidden definition is not enough.

We actually need to look into the set of parameters like aesthetics and functional dimensions of the design process. Moreover, we also need to look into the social and political dimensions of the design because a design appreciated at one location may get you to shower with criticism at another place.

Now, if you are wondering where the design will help you, let me clear you right away.

Design is not only in drawings or paintings; the design is everywhere, from engineering to management to even garment designing. Let me surprise you a little more. Creating skyscrapers to creating brand reputation to content marketing all involve design.

I’m sure you must now be pretty convinced what design means, but anything that exists in all kinds of creation must have a process, too, isn’t it?

The design also has a process involved in it. Let’s have a look at the steps.

6 Steps of Design Process

The design process has six steps involved. Let’s get started with the first step in the list.

Step №1: Define.

The first step is to define the steps involved, defining the problem to think of the step as one of which the problem statement is defined. For any design process to begin, the designers must understand the exact problem at hand.

For the benefit of all of you, let me cite an example. Suppose you need to design a bookshelf for your study room. Now, you may think, what is the big deal in this?

Just think for a moment, what is the exact problem you want to solve with the bookshelf? Is it just the management of your books or management of limited space as well inside of your study room?

Now, suppose you want to design the bookshelf to manage your books in a tiny space. So the problem statement becomes how to design a bookshelf that can hold a maximum number of books using a minimum amount of space.

Step №2: Collect information.

Now, once you have determined the problem statement, you are good to go to the next step, which is to collect information. Once you have understood the problem you will solve, you need to collect reliable and useful information from various sources. You can think of visiting your favorite library, or you can spend hours searching stuff on Google itself. In our example, you may check for the designs available in the market that save space and organize books very well. You may also need to check the aesthetics of the various bookshelves that have been designed to date.

Aspects like the adjoining articles, location of the bookshelf on the wall, and the colors that may suit the colors you have on your wall. This collecting all the information is covered under this step of information collection.

So how does information collection happens?

It is just a step that involves people searching stuff all over the web. So it is something even beyond that. Well, as you may have guessed by now, it is certainly way beyond Google search. Information collection requires people to do field visits, look back at similar things to their product, and find the best models to get inspired by.

This step will mean taking photographs, sketching the prototypes, and interviewing the client or the people you are designing, that is, your audience per se. Although we don’t need to interview anyone for the bookshelf in our case, in our example, you may have to search for bookshelf designs that consume less space, have less weight, and have maximum shelf space. You also have to invest time visiting furniture shops and carpenters to identify the kind of designs that will work for you.

Step №3: Coming up with ideas

Once we are satisfied that enough information has been collected, we then move on to the next step called brainstorming or analyzing (coming up with ideas). I guess you have already laid out what this step actually means. Yes, my friends, this is the idea generation, the step where you need to bring up many ideas, which is the very soul of the design process. This step requires you to think of all possible solutions to a problem statement through all kinds of ideas.

One important fact that you have to keep in mind for this step is that you should not limit the ideas at any cost. Let the idea be vague, let them sound absolutely unnecessary, but all you actually need to do is bring up those ideas and note them down. Trust me, even if any idea seems vague, it will not strike you ever again, and maybe this idea that looked so vague, the one which you might implement later, you never know. Friends don’t strike out any new ideas. Most of the revolutionary products in the world are a result of out-of-the-box thinking. So go ahead and take some solutions to the problem statement we have in hand for the bookshelf. So I believe you have thought over some possible designs for the bookshelf.

Let me tell you some of my ideas for a bookshelf in my home. I prefer something made of teakwood, which I can easily pick with my two hands, although I wouldn’t mind using only one hand. I would also like to have a circular bookshelf and one that is black in color and has sliding compartments hidden inside it.

Step №4: Building Solutions

The next big step is Building Solutions. Yes, my friends, this is the time to get your hands dirty. This is the moment to create the prototypes that you have imagined throughout. Pick up the tools, pull your chair and start constructing the thing right from the start. This step will lead to the creation of a real-world prototype that you can use temporarily. Please note the word temporarily wondering why?

Hold on; I will explain the reason to you. Development of solutions can also take the form of making schematic diagrams. If you are short of tools and are desperate to jump to this step, schematic diagrams help portray the entire plan in 2D on paper.

However, just tell me frankly, how many of you would prefer a 2D movie over a superb 3D movie?

I’m not sure about you all, but I will certainly run behind 3D movies. This step of the design process helps us illustrate the big ideas that we had imagined and filter out the bad ideas.

How many of you have also successfully figured out the hidden agenda of this step?

Well, as I explain the hidden agenda, don’t forget to pat on your back if you could figure it out before these words of mine. The step of developing solutions helps you to find if your blue sky ideas will work or not. This step helps you draw the boundaries and find which ideas you had written in the list should be taken forward and discarded.

Many ideas look fancy in imagination, but many a time, physical concept, principles of design, and aesthetics don’t allow it. In this step, you will be left with only the good ideas at the end.

So going back to our bookshelf, did you draw the diagram for how your bookshelf will look like? What ideas did you consider, and which one did you discard?

In my case, I discarded the idea of sliding compartments hidden inside it because I am not going to need it much often.

Step №5: Feedback

How can something good be created in this world unless we receive feedback?

Similarly, in the design process, the next step that is feedback, is of huge importance. No solution is going to be perfect in the first go. Hence, you need to evaluate your designs on all the parameters you have set and aesthetics, ease of use, durability, or reliability. Your design must last longer and better than other possible designs. Don’t forget to show your designs to other people like your friends, your family, and your teachers and gather their suggestions, criticisms, and certain appreciations.

In our example, I had received feedback that said Black is not a good color for a bookshelf. Black looks quite boring, and the bookshelf must have Zazzy colors. I want to mention here that the feedback must be taken from people who have an eye for detail and critical in their observation. For God’s sake, don’t ask those who use the Sandwich Method to give feedback, and an eye for detail will help you to get your design evaluated quickly and learn about the aspects that it is missing. Without feedback, you cannot even hope to improve the designs and make them worthy of anything or anyone.

Step №6: Improve and Build Product.

Here we come to the final step, which is to improve. Look out for ways in which you can improve your design or refine it accordingly. Moreover, don’t feel afraid to revamp your design altogether. You may need to restart from the first step. This is because the people's feedback can help you identify different or perhaps even bigger problem statements that you may not have even thought about.

The entire process may have to be reiterated. I can see that some of you are giving me scaring look while reading this. But believe me, iteration is the essence of the design process. You may also need to hire a specialist for the improvements. Who knows, the finishing of the paint on the bookshelf is not good and may require the fine hands of a painter or an artist. We can make improvements in our example by looking for bright colors and gell along with the color of our walls.

The last step is to build it finally. This is the final step because, in this step, you will incorporate all the important aspects and the suggestions received in the feedback. Don’t fret if the process takes months to complete. Remember, Rome was not built in a day, and your design can’t be an exception to this rule.

So now you have learned the fundamentals of the design process, with this knowledge in your hand and zeal to be a great designer. I hope you got something out of this article, and Thanks for Reading it.