Design Thinking templates
Simplify your workflows and optimize your daily routines with our collection of design thinking templates.
App Wireframe
Ready to start building an app? Don’t just imagine how it will function and how users will interact with it—let a wireframe show you. Wireframing is a technique for creating a basic layout of each screen. When you wireframe, ideally early in the process, you’ll gain an understanding of what each screen will accomplish and get buy-in from important stakeholders—all before adding the design and content, which will save you time and money. And by thinking of things in terms of a user’s journey, you’ll deliver a more compelling, successful experience.
5 Whys
Ready to get to the root of the problem? There’s no simpler way to do it than the 5 Whys technique. You’ll start with a simple question: Why did the problem happen? Then you’ll keep asking, up to four more times, until the answer becomes clear and you can work toward a solution. And Miro’s features enhance the approach: You can ask team members questions in chat or @mention them in comments, and use color-coded sticky notes to call out issues that are central to the problem at hand.
Crazy Eights
Sometimes you just need to get the team’s creative juices flowing for a brainstorm—and get them thinking of as many ideas as they can, as fast as they can. Crazy Eights will do it in a hurry. Favoring quantity over quality, this sketch brainstorming exercise challenges them to come up with eight ideas in eight minutes, which leaves no time to second guess ideas. It’s perfect for early stages of development, and it’s a team favorite for being fast paced and fun.
DMAIC Analysis
Processes might not seem like the funnest thing to dive into and examine, but wow can it pay off—a more efficient process can lead to serious cost savings and a better product. That’s what DMAIC analysis does. Developed as part of the Six Sigma initiative, DMAIC is a data-driven quality strategy for streamlining processes and resolving issues. The technique is broken into five fundamental steps that are followed in order: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
Scenario Mapping
Scenario mapping is the process of outlining all the steps a user will take to complete a task. The scenario mapping template helps you create a visual guide to what different personas are doing, thinking, and feeling in different situations. Use scenario mapping to outline an intended or ideal scenario (what should happen) as well as what currently happens. If you’re trying to outline the ideal scenario, user mapping should take place very early on in a project and can help inform user stories and the product backlog. If you’re just trying to get a better sense of what currently happens, you can do user mapping when conducting user interviews or observation.
Research Design
A design research map is a grid framework showing the relationship between two key intersections in research methodologies: mindset and approach. Design research maps encourage your team or clients to develop new business strategies using generative design thinking. Originally designed by academic Liz Sanders, the framework is meant to resolve confusion or overlap between research and design methods. Whether your team is in problem-solving or problem space definition mode, using a research design template can help you consider the collective value of many unrelated practices.
Prototype
A prototype is a live mockup of your product that defines the product’s structure, user flow, and navigational details (such as buttons and menus) without committing to final details like visual design. Prototyping allows you to simulate how a user might experience your product or service, map out user contexts and task flows, create scenarios to understand personas, and collect feedback on your product. Using a prototype helps you save money by locating roadblocks early in the process. Prototypes can vary, but they generally contain a series of screens or artboards connected by arrows or links.
Product Canvas
Product canvases are a concise yet content-rich tool that conveys what your product is and how it is strategically positioned. Combining Agile and UX, a project canvas complements user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches, and other UX artefacts. Product canvases are useful because they help product managers define a prototype. Creating a product canvas is an important first step in deciding who potential users may be, the problem to be solved, basic product functionality, advanced functionalities worth exploring, competitive advantage, and customers’ potential gain from the product.
Low-fidelity Prototype
Low fidelity prototypes serve as practical early visions of your product or service. These simple prototypes share only a few features with the final product. They are best for testing broad concepts and validating ideas. Low fidelity prototypes help product and UX teams study product or service functionality by focusing on rapid iteration and user testing to inform future designs. The focus on sketching and mapping out content, menus, and user flow allows both designers and non-designers to participate in the design and ideation process. Instead of producing linked interactive screens, low fidelity prototypes focus on insights about user needs, designer vision, and alignment of stakeholder goals.
Online Sketching
Before you go full steam ahead with a promising idea, look at it from a high level — to know how it functions and how well it meets your goals. That’s what sketches do. This template gives you a powerful remote collaboration tool for the initial stages of prototyping, whether you’re sketching out web pages and mobile apps, designing logos, or planning events. Then you can easily share your sketch with your team, and save each stage of your sketch before changing it and building on it.
Jobs to be Done
It’s all about a job done right — customers “hire” a product or service to do a “job,” and if it's not done right, the customer will find someone to do it better. Built on that simple premise, the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework helps entrepreneurs, start-ups, and business managers define who their customer is and see unmet needs in the market. A standard job story lets you see things from your customers’ perspective by telling their story with a “When I…I Want To…So That I …” story structure.
Customer Problem Statement
A company of any size or kind needs to be able to make its case—by clearly articulating how its product will meet customers’ needs. A customer problem statement will help make that case a compelling one. How? You’ll dive into your customers’ thoughts and feelings, which ups your odds of creating something they will find valuable. And a problem statement does more than deliver big for your customers—it helps your teams align around a common, clearly defined goal, and feel invested in achieving it.
Storyboard
While storyboard is typically associated with planning out scenes for a movie or TV show, it’s been widely adopted throughout the business world. A storyboard is a sequence of illustrations that are used to develop a story. You can use the Storyboarding template anytime you’d like to really put yourself in a customer or user’s position and understand how they think, feel, and act. This tactic can be especially useful when you know there’s a problem or inefficiency with an existing process. You can storyboard existing processes or workflows and plan how you would like them to look in the future.
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