What is Design Thinking?
Simply design thinking is a philosophy and a set of tools to help you solve problems creatively. When a company is trying to create something new, solve a problem, when a team is trying to solve a complex problem you can use design thinking to help you get to that solution. Many processes can be used for problem-solving. Design thinking specifically focuses on the human-centered side of creative problem-solving. So design thinking looks at all of creative problem-solving through the lens of human-centered design, that’s a human-centered approach, it’s about empathizing and figuring out who you are designing for, what their needs are, and then helping you to solve that problem helping you to innovate based on those needs.
So whereas many other solving problem-solving processes before design thinking were always about well we have this technology let’s make this thing, but design thinking helps you look at this from the customer — the human perspective. There are five main steps to any design thinking process, even though in each of these steps the exercises themselves or the specific process is very very flexible and every company and every designer and every design thinker does it differently. But the five steps always remain the same.
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The five main steps to any design thinking process
1. EMPATHIZE
This step is just about understanding the people you’re trying to design the product for, the product, or the service for, and in this step a lot of the time it’s about gathering information, interviewing, doing user interviews, creating personas trying to figure out who am I making this for, what is their problem and unreel what do these people do. It’s about empathizing with the people you’re designing for.
2. DEFINE
In the define step, you’re taking everything you learned in step one in the empathize step and you’re defining and breaking it down and coming to conclusions about what are the user’s needs based on everything you have learned from interviewing these people, what are their problems, what are their challenges, what are the types of things or insights we could take from empathizing with these users. So we will able to know the problem, the common problem, the common challenge, etc, and can decide what all things we need to take from the empathizing section.
3. IDEATE
Now you’re taking everything you learned in the previous two steps and comes with solutions and Ideas. We find the potential matches of products or services. And then try to match your solution with the insights you figured out in the empathize and defined section of the design thinking process. what you’re doing is coming together, you’re coming up with ideas and often this is the bit that looks sort of like a brainstorming workshop you’ve got posters everywhere people are coming together people are sharing ideas and people are trying to come up with ideas.
4. PROTOTYPE
Now what you’re doing is you’re taking all of these ideas and breaking them down into a select few that you think might be worth making into something more realistic. Then you are turning these ideas into simple testable prototypes which are not fully designed or fully coded. But they’re essentially a facade, essentially a fake thing whether that’s a digital product or a physical product, you’re just trying to quickly make something that you can test with real users.
5. TEST
In the test phase, you’re taking your prototypes that are based on what you created in the third step and fourth step, and now you’re testing with real people, and these real people are selected based on what you learned in step one and empathize. These real people are gonna use the product and you’re going to get feedback from them in real-time based on what they’re using. Once you’ve got your test results you go back again into the defined phase because there will be a lot of new insights. So you will gather all these insights together and go back to the design phase. Then you’re back to the ideate phase again based on your new learnings, new ideas, updated ideas. Then back to prototype again and then to test phase again. That is the core design thinking cycle. The important thing to understand here is these five steps are like the zoomed-out map of how Design thinking and how the design thinking process works however, the exact exercises within these circles are not defined.
So you need to understand that’s an important difference between design thinking and something like design sprints. In design thinking, you have a broad map of what you’re going to be doing over the next weeks, months, years but no rule-set says you have to do this exercise you have to do this persona you have to do this. whereas into something like design sprints, it’s more like a recipe you have to do it.
Conclusion
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