Writing on Hashnode has been quite an exciting journey and I'm grateful to FOF Africa for the opportunity to learn and explore in the design sphere. Recently I published an article on UX design and how it plays a crucial role in making the users have a seamless experience.

Design Thinking is another element of UX that cannot be scrapped out. It is the process that teams use to understand users, define problems and come up with practical solutions. This process involves 5 phases: Empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing.

The teams working on redesigning the New York Times app did amazing and I'd like to point out a few things I had learned when I came across the case study.

Problems/ challenges

First of all, I'd like to state that the case study highlighted the problems or challenges the users faced which led to the redesign of the app in the first place. Most of the problems were; competition and cost, lack of usage and irrelevant content. These led to the loss of their users. This phase in design thinking is the "define" phase. It aims at the real problem your design is set out to solve.

Research and Empathy

The teams involved in the product conducted research and understood their users and their target audience. The user needs and pain points were considered when the user persona was drawn. This phase in the design thinking process is extremely important. Different factors like time, schedule, and habits also contributed to the features to focus on during the design process.

Prototyping / Testing

After a set of research and interviews, some features were added to improve the feel of the app. A very subtle but important input was the inclusion of the feature "Timely" on the landing page- to help users receive notifications based on their habits and schedules. The product was also tested and criticized. The final prototype included both manual and automatic modes.