Today I attended a virtual networking event, Design Thinking 101 which was an event for people who were interested in UI/UX design. The speakers were Christine Chiang and Joshua Davis. Christine Chiang is an expert in UX design, Joshua Davis was a web designer and now he is also a UX designer. Their conversation was very inspiring. During the event, they talked about what design thinking is. Design thinking is actually problem solving, which starts with empathy. Overall, there are 5 stages of design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. During their conversation, I gained a deeper understanding about design thinking, as designers we have to develop human centric solutions so that the user will come back to our product.
After they talked about the 5 stages of the design thinking, they brought up two interesting topics, sketching and testing often. Sketching is important, even though now a lot of people use Adobe xd and other digital tools, sketching is a fast and easy way to develop ideas. During the sketching, designers visualize their idea instead of just thinking in their mind which helps the team and client to see how the idea came from. To test often is also important because once we have the idea and prototype, we have to test and we get the results. The results can reflect the weakness of the prototype and we can go back to our idea and then make a difference so we can test again. This semester, I also have the UI/UX course because I am interested in UI/UX design. This event brought a lot of information to me and the experience of meeting these expert taught me that it’s essential to understand and actually do the 5 stages of the design thinking, because all the steps are connected together.
