=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2856/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=Design Thinking Approaches in IT Projects
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2856/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-2856
|authors=Larysa Nozdrina,Marta Savka
}}
==Design Thinking Approaches in IT Projects==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2856/paper9.pdf
Design Thinking Approaches in IT Projects
Nozdrina Larysa Savka Marta
Ph.D., Associate professor Associate professor
Lviv Educational-Scientific Institute of State Lviv Educational-Scientific Institute of State
University "University of Banking", University "University of Banking",
Ukraine, Lviv Ukraine, Lviv
larisa@pancha.lviv.ua martasavka22@gmail.com
Design thinking in IT uses the designer's sensibility and methods to define and match
people's needs with what can be converted into technical innovative solution that will
have a value for the customers and market opportunity. The article presents a design
thinking process and it’s stages.
Keywords: IT market, IT project, Design thinking, UI / UX designer
Introductory part. Nowadays, the IT industry in Ukraine is particularly important, because despite the
general economic and political crisis, it is able to develop rapidly, ensuring the functioning of other related industries.
The IT sector of Ukraine continues to grow at a higher pace than the country's economy as a whole, and in 2017 IT
market grew by 20%, and in 2018 it is expected to reach 30%. IT services in 2017 ranked 3rd in the export of services
from Ukraine, and according to the results of the first half of 2018, they became the second largest export service
sector (more than 20% of all services) [1].
Despite the spectacular growth, the Ukrainian IT market continues to remain globally small at around 1% of
the global rate. Therefore, breakthrough ideas are needed in order to ensure the further growth of the IT market in
Ukraine. Nowadays our companies starts to deviate from outsourcing, offering customers innovative turnkey products
and ready-made solutions for business tasks [2].
In the last decade, the success of innovation throughout the world (and not only in IT) is facilitated by design-
thinking - a methodology for solving engineering, business and other tasks, which is based on a creative, not only
analytical approach that allows to create human oriented services and products [3].
The development of the concept of design thinking, based on the interdisciplinary approach, was started by B.
Fuller, and developed by scientists from various fields of science: R. McCim, G. Simon (first doctrines of design
thinking: rapid prototyping and testing through product user monitoring), D. Norman (user-oriented design), V.
Papanek, B. Lawson, N. Cross, D. S. Mellon, R. Buccanevent, S. Johns, E. Sanders, R. Martin and others. Today,
leading international companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, Samsung uses design thinking to create
innovations. Also it is taught at the best business schools and universities in the world, including Stanford [3-4].
Design thinking in Ukraine is still not used enough, so the purpose of this article is to describe the approaches of using
this methodology in IT projects, in particular, in Web-projects, products of which are websites, at the stage of
designing web-design.
Main part. Nowadays, the profession called "web designer" has been transformed and acquired a new
name and meaning: "UI / UX designer", which means - a specialist designing user interfaces. UX (user experience)
and UI (user interface) are two different design directions (user experience from product work and visual product
appearance) whose creation tasks are closely interrelated and therefore performed by a single versatile specialist.
According to design thinking UI / UX design specifics [5], designers needs to understand the theory of color,
typography, composition, ergonomics of the site (principles of usability, convenience and rules of usage of interface
elements), as well as the basics of marketing, business analysis, psychology.
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
For more effective communication with developers it would be a benefit for designer if he have HTML / CSS
skills and basic knowledge, understanding of JavaScript and frameworks. However, the first and most basic skill in
part of the UI is to master the graphic editor, the most popular of which is Sketch, Figma, Adobe Creative Suite (Adobe
Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects), Principle, Zeplin. In our opinion, Zeplin is the best tool for UI
designers and front-end developers to collaborate between each others. It extends beyond the design and prototyping
process and helps teams to transfer a design.
All needed annotations are automatically added to projects (sizes, colors, fields, and even CSS-instructions for
certain elements). It creates an online space, and the entire team can use it for their work. Zeplin allows UI / UX
designers to download their own wireframes or visual design projects directly from Sketch / Figma / Adobe Illustrator
and add them to their own project folders.
When an IT company starts working on a project, before starting the product development and implementation
phase, there is a complex processes of researching the target audience, determining the required functionality, building
information architecture, developing an ideological concept, designing the interface, prototypes of the finished
product, testing them. etc [6].
The design-thinking process structures the initial work on an IT project and consists the following steps [3-4]:
1. Empathize (research, empathy) - communicating with potential audiences or the market for better
understanding user`s needs and desires. For an IT project, it is very important to consider this project from the business
point of view of (Stakeholder Interview), analyze competitors' on the market, build a business model and think about
how will users find out about your product (the first stages of Userflow).
2. Define - approximation of clarity based on the previous stage in order to create meaningful and precise
formulation of the existing problem in order to determine who the product is being developed for and which features
and capabilities should it have.
This is a step in deeper analytics: creating a POV (point of view) - a main message that describes user needs.
It is necessary to find patterns, to eliminate obvious deviations, to identify contradictions. So at this stage personas
should be created - detailed, realistic, generalized character of the target audience of the project, the creation of
Empathy Map and User Journey Map (UJM) - a tool for visualizing user interaction with the product using the model
"AS IS".
3. Ideate (idea formulation) is a mode of design process in which everything should be concentrated on the
ideas generation. This phase exists in order to move from identifying problems to creating solutions for users by using
the method of brainstorming. At this stage, the sketch of the future product and the User Journey Map model ("TO
BE") are also being developed.
4. Prototype (prototype creation). For the high quality prototype, its development should include the following
steps: 1) wireframe - a low-detailed design representation that roughly visualizes the user interface and includes an
information architecture; 2) mock-up is a medium or highly detailed static representation of the design that visualizes
the content and demonstrates the functionality; 3) an interactive, clickable prototype - an interactive model of a
product, created by using wireframes or mock-ups. In the early stages, you should create such prototypes, which can
be done quickly and cheaply, but at the same time fror which you can get helpful feedback from users and colleagues,
and use this feedback to improve the product.
5. Test. This stage provides feedback from the target audience about prototypes created in the project and about
what their next iterations should be. Unlike the empathy stage, the problem is specified by the user's POV.
Conclusion. Design Thinking is a design methodology that involves a decision-based approach to problem
solving. The value of design thinking approaches for modern business in IT is that the design research allows you to
identify, interpret, and visualize information in a form that is accessible for further communication to all stakeholders.
The design-thinking methodology was used in the design of the House Save project. This is an innovative IT
project about creation of an online service and mobile application to improve communication between ACMB
residents and their administration. The main functions of this service are: administrative panel for the head ACMH,
built-in messenger, online voting, utilities payment, payment history, the latest news feed and more. In the future, it
is planned to add the function of video conferences with the aim of facilitating the process of attending the assembly
by ACMB members.
References
1. Rozvytok ukrains'koi IT-industrii. Analitychnyj zvit. (2018) [Development Ukrainian IT Industry]. Kyiv:
Asotsiatsiia «IT Ukraine» [in Ukrainian].
2. Kelli D. & Kelli T. Tvorcha vpevnenist'. Yak rozkryty svij potentsial (2017) [Creative confidence. How to
reveal your potential]. Kyiv: Osnovy [in Ukrainian].
3. Plattner H., Meinel Ch., & Leifer L. (ed.) Design Thinking Research. Making Design Thinking
Foundational. (2016). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
4. Plattner H. An Introduction to Design Thinking: Process Guide. Institute of Design at Stanford. (n.d.)
dschool-old.stanford.edu. Retrieved from: https://dschool-old.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources
/wiki/36873/attachments/74b3d/ModeGuideBOOTCAMP2010L.pdf
5. Brown T. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires
Innovation. Canada: HarperCollins Publishers.
6. Soegaard M. The Basics of User Experience (UX) Design by the Interaction Design Foundation (2018).
Interaction Design Foundation.