Design Thinking | Mendix

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Build User-Centric Apps
with Design Thinking

Deliver better apps for your users and business with an iterative, user-centric approach to development

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What is design thinking?

Design thinking is a business practice that breaks down the biases and behavioral norms that obstruct innovation. When design thinking is applied to application development, cross-functional teams use empathy, collaboration, and experimentation to swiftly solve complex business challenges in a user-centric way.

The design thinking process

To build successful apps, teams need a deep understanding of the intended users, their behaviors, and their motivations. The design thinking process is structured to help teams gather valuable user insights that can be translated into innovative solutions.

  • Empathize

    Gather information to understand how app users think and feel.

  • Define

    Turn user information into clearly defined insights.

  • Ideate

    Brainstorm app ideas based on user insights.

  • Prototype

    Start building and testing your ideas.

  • Evaluate

    Collect feedback on your prototypes and iterate.

Design thinking with Mendix

Turn ideas into outcomes. The Mendix low-code application development platform incorporates design thinking best practices so you can deliver value to your users and business.

Rapidly ideate and innovate

Use the insights gathered during the empathy stage to ideate and iterate on innovative and impactful solutions to users’ problems.

  • Empower domain experts to bring ideas to life by quickly building functional prototypes in a visual, model-driven development environment.

  • Assemble and modify screens quickly with a variety of reusable UI elements available in the Mendix Atlas UI Framework.

  • Preview apps as they’re being built and empower developers to work with end users to gather feedback and make rapid iterations.

Keep user needs front and center

Deliver apps that satisfy both user needs and business objectives. Mendix helps teams stay focused on users throughout the entire app design and development lifecycle.

  • Enable collaborative design thinking for developers, stakeholders, business teams, and users.

  • Share working prototypes or MVPs instantly with users to begin collecting and iterating based on real-world feedback.

  • Gather further insights with a built-in feedback loop that’s integrated into the development environment.

Move seamlessly from prototype to production

Save time, effort, and resources with app prototyping and testing. Instead of throwaway mockups, Mendix enables teams to create working prototypes that seamlessly evolve into production apps.

  • Extend prototypes with complex logic and integrations with Mendix Studio Pro.

  • Develop apps iteratively with built-in tools for managing Agile project (user stores, sprints, and backlogs).

  • Deploy and scale apps quickly by leveraging out-of-the-box high availability and failover for web-scale operations.

Promote UX resource consistency and reuse

Create your own enterprise design language with Mendix Atlas UI Framework. Developers can leverage UX design resources as they build to ensure app portfolio consistency.

  • Create an enterprise design language with your brand’s theme and a customized set of page templates, building blocks, and widgets.

  • Package custom UI elements into a branded starter app and distribute via Mendix’s App Store to kickstart development.

  • Empower developers without UI design skills to deliver great UX by leveraging reusable UI elements based on best practices.

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