Practicing Design Thinking
By: Gurpreet Singh
Tags: Design Patterns, UX Research, Design Research, Design Process, Design Thinking

Practicing Design Thinking

Capturing some extra data points (timings) for better user experience.

Problem Statement

There are times when the user comes back to us that they drop off from the listings page because they do not find their preferred time. We want to capture what time the user wants to travel before he searches and bounces off from the listing page.

Image Credit: Interaction Design Foundation

The above-shared image of the design process is taken from The Interaction Design Foundation which is lead by well-known UX practitioners like Clayton Christensen and Don Norman. I am personally a strong believer in the design process for solving any kind of real-world problems.

It’s very common for us to just see the problem statement and jump to a solution. Which is quite similar to the following lines by Nas & Damian Marley.

You buy khaki pants and all of sudden you say I am Indiana Jones. — Nas & Damian Marley — Patience.

Design thinking is extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown. Let’s start to understand and resolve the above-shared problem statement using this approach.

Step 1 — Empathise

Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process like design thinking because it allows you to come out of your own assumptions about the problem and gain real insights into users and their needs.

My primary objective was to know as much as I can about the experience of booking a bus ticket through an app. As I personally prefer to travel by motorcycle or car most of the time, that’s why I decided to prepare a short questionnaire and asked my colleagues to know the importance of timing while booking a bus ticket.

Fortunately, many of my friends & colleagues travel a lot through the bus. Some of them doing it on a daily basis by using platforms like Shuttl and a couple of them travel on a weekly basis to their home towns.

As a part of qualitative research below are the questions I asked :

How often do you travel & does it include intercity travel?

Which platform do you use to book tickets?

What do you like about the platform?

Can you show me how you book tickets on this platform?

Would it make your experience better if your preferred timing is also asked before showing the listing of buses?

These questions helped me to understand the gravity of the problem and know more about the factors which help the user to take decisions while booking a bus ticket.

Step 2 — Define

As they say, a well-defined problem is half solved. In this phase of design thinking, idea is to analyze the collected data of your research and synthesize them to define the core problems we have identified so far. Below is the rephrased problem statement which helps us empathize and have a clear understanding of the end-user goal.

“User needs to have clear access to the timings of buses in order to make booking decisions easy”

Although, there are multiple factors that affect the decision making of the user. Rating of the bus, Hygenic rest-stops, and price of the ticket are some of them.

Step 3 — Ideate

During the very first phase which was to empathize with the user, I did some competitive research along with qualitative research to understand how other apps or platforms handle and serve user’s needs.