What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.
At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods. It revolves around a deep interest in developing an understanding of the people for whom we are designing the products or services.
Key Takeaway: Design Thinking is not just about aesthetics. It is a methodology used to solve complex problems in a highly user-centric way.
The 5-Step Process
The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (d.school) describes design thinking as a five-stage process. Note that these stages are not always sequential. They do not have to follow any specific order and they can often occur in parallel and repeat iteratively.
1. Empathize
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging, and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations.
Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.
2. Define
During the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathize stage. This is where you will analyze your observations and synthesize them in order to define the core problems that you and your team have identified up to this point.
You should seek to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centered manner. Instead of defining the problem as your own wish or a need of the company like, "We need to increase our food-product market share among young teenage girls by 5%," a much better way to define the problem would be, "Teenage girls need to eat nutritious food in order to thrive, be healthy and grow."
3. Ideate
During the third stage of the Design Thinking process, designers are ready to start generating ideas. You have grown to understand your users and their needs in the Empathize stage, and you have analyzed and synthesized your observations in the Define stage, and ended up with a human-centered problem statement.
With this solid background, you and your team members can start to "think outside the box" to identify new solutions to the problem statement you created, and you can look for alternative ways of viewing the problem. There are hundreds of Ideation techniques such as Brainstorming, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER.
4. Prototype
The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product or specific features found within the product, so they can investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage. Prototypes may be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments, or on a small group of people outside the design team.
This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. The solutions are implemented within the prototypes, and, one by one, they are investigated and either accepted, improved and re-examined, or rejected on the basis of the users' experiences.
5. Test
Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. This is the final stage of the 5-stage-model, but in an iterative process, the results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave, and feel, and to empathize.
Pro Tip: Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.
Why It Matters
Design Thinking essentially minimizes the uncertainty and risk of innovation by engaging customers or users through a series of prototypes to learn, test, and refine concepts. Design thinkers rely on customer insights gained from real-world experiments, not just historical data or market research.
By using this methodology, your organization can move from "guessing" what customers want to "knowing" what they need, saving significant time and budget on development cycles.
