Embed UX in your workflow

To effectively grow your team's UX culture and maturity, incorporating UX research methods tailored to each design thinking stage is essential.

Here’s how to integrate these methods throughout your design workflow:

• Empathize: During the initial stages, use user interviews and ethnographic studies to deeply understand user needs and experiences.
• Define: As you synthesize findings, develop personas and define jobs to be done to clarify and articulate the core problems and user goals.
• Ideate: In this creative phase, employ techniques like brainstorming sessions and design sprints to generate innovative solutions.
• Prototype: Utilize usability testing or focus groups to gather user feedback and iterate quickly, refining concepts based on real interactions.
• Test: Before finalizing the design, conduct extensive user testing such as A/B testing and beta trials to ensure the solution meets user expectations and functions as intended.

Expanding your team's UX toolkit encourages experimentation with different methods. For example, you might shift from heuristic evaluations to more detailed usability testing, or from unmoderated to moderated user studies, to gain more actionable insights.