As a UX Designer, it's essential to nurture an innovative mindset because a significant aspect of our work revolves around uncovering and comprehending previously unknown problems. We then have the exciting challenge of crafting creative solutions to tackle them head-on.
At the core of being a Product Designer is the mission to improve people's lives. To accomplish this, we must avoid falling into the trap of habituation. You see, habituation happens when we become so accustomed to the routine of our daily lives that we start losing sight of, feeling for, and even acknowledging the problems surrounding us.
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Let's dive deeper into this topic and explore three valuable tips to help you maintain a sharp focus on innovation. Join us as we draw inspiration from Tony Fadell's captivating talk, The first secret of great design.
Discover more insights in this enlightening discussion:
Mindset and Different Perspectives
As a UX Designer, paying attention to the small things, the tiniest details of everyday life, is a big part of our routine.
However, it goes beyond noticing the common problems that everyone is aware of. Our task is to identify and empathize with the ones that often go unnoticed by others.
But how can we accomplish this? Follow the tips we've shared throughout this article, and unlock the power to enhance people's lives by applying UX Design in your projects.
Join us on this journey and discover how you can make a difference through the lens of UX Design. Together, let's create meaningful experiences for those we serve.
1) Keep a Broad Perspective
To understand the problems users face in a particular situation, a Product Designer needs to step away from their professional role and immerse themselves in the scene as the user themselves.
By empathizing through their own experiences, they can gain insight into the daily situations their persona encounters. This perspective shift enables them to see things differently and notice the problems, pains, and needs of the user.
It's also essential to simplify the problem as much as possible. This means dissecting the situation and getting to the root cause to visualize the actual challenge that needs to be overcome. Often, users themselves may not accurately articulate their problem, requiring you to conduct a comprehensive investigation.
The invention of the escalator serves as an example of how maintaining a broad perspective helps UX Designers find solutions to everyday problems. By putting themselves in the shoes of users who wake up early for work and may not be thrilled about climbing several flights of stairs, the designer found a way to enhance their experience by developing a product that simplifies and improves that particular user moment.
Stay open-minded, embrace different perspectives, and let them guide you in creating impactful solutions that truly address user needs.
Reading tip: Design Thinking: Creating Innovative Solutions
2) Stay vigilant
Our tip here is to stay attentive to your surroundings. Examining things up close and seeking to understand the smallest details is a crucial characteristic for a UX Designer.
Combined with the previous tip, the message we want to convey is that to become an excellent UX professional, you need to be able to put yourself in the user's shoes and pay attention to the details of their everyday life. By following both tips, you will be able to identify problems that often go unnoticed by others.
Examples
One example we can mention is Steve Jobs. In the past, when people bought an electronic product, they had to charge them before being able to use it. This situation caused a lot of frustration for users who wanted to test and use the product they had just purchased. Instead, they had to wait for hours until it was fully charged.
After recognizing the user's disappointment, Jobs started selling his products already charged. This way, the user no longer felt frustration but only the joy and happiness of being able to use their product right out of the box!
Another example of this combination is when Mary Anderson invented the automatic windshield wiper. During a bus trip, Anderson noticed that every time the driver needed to clean the windshield, they had to open the window and stretch their arm out. This created two problems: discomfort for the passenger (or user) and a safety hazard for everyone around.
Anderson put herself in the position of a bus passenger (broad perspective) who feels the cold wind (and probably rain) when the driver opens the window and has their safety put at risk.
She understood the real problem behind the situation (attentive observation) – the lack of an efficient windshield cleaning device – and created a device that allowed the driver to clean the windshield from inside the bus in a more efficient way.
3) Keep your inner child alive
The last tip is to think like a child. Why is something the way it is? What factors are influencing our choices? What considerations led us to option x instead of y?
Children possess a natural ability to question everything around them. Their minds operate with newness, often fueled by their innate curiosity. They fearlessly ask questions that leave us stumped as we struggle to provide satisfactory answers.
Unfortunately, instead of nurturing their inquisitiveness, we often discourage them with responses like "That's just how the world is." But we should nurture their curiosity.
And we should try to do the same, embrace their inquiring nature, and encourage our curiosity to develop intelligent and innovative solutions to everyday problems.
In UX, it is crucial to maintain this investigative mindset. A person with an innovative mindset helps motivate and challenge the entire team, promoting productive questioning in search of the answers to the "whys".
Reading tip: 5 Reasons to Look for a UX Design Mentor
Conclusion
By embracing the combination of these three tips, Product Designers can break free from the habits of their daily routines and establish a mindset of innovation. It involves maintaining a broad, attentive, and fresh perspective.
This means continuously putting themselves in the user's shoes to understand their needs and pains, paying attention to the small details and issues that arise in the user's daily life, and staying motivated to creatively investigate these situations in search of innovative solutions to everyday annoyances.
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