Design Thinking and its Process (with an illustration)
Design thinking is an iterative and expansive process of solving problems by creating new and innovative ideas or redefining problems and recreating existing solutions. This might require one to be intuitive by recognizing patterns and constructing new ideas that have emotional meanings to humans as well as being functional. The intent of design thinking is to improve products by analyzing and understanding how users interact with products and ways to improve them.
It helps one to conduct a proper research, in order to come up with a clear statement of problem (and not the perceived one), come up with alternative solutions to the problem given data from previous projects, prototype, and test the product so as to discover ways of improving the design.
Illustration:
Implementing the design thinking process for a Farm Produce App
In order to enhance users experience positively, efforts should be made in understanding how the user interacts with the app. Empathizing with the users by observing, engaging, learning why and how they make use of your product gives directions in trying to solve their problems. For example, striking a conversation with a farmer on how he goes about his activities or tasks tells his story which could lead to defining a meaningful and actionable problem statement.
Consequently, a well formed problem statement leads naturally into the ideation stage. Assuming it is found, from conversing with various farmers, that their farm produce end up spoiling leading to huge losses. A good problem statement would aim at discovering the reason why the produce spoils. Good hypotheses could be due to infestation, dampness, price rate, transportation, or simply no market (demand) for it, etc. It is left to the design engineer to come up with alternative solutions to the real problem and prototyping and testing these solutions for the best alternative.
If the problem statement highlighted the reason was low market demand, the alternative solutions could include connecting the farmers’ with high demand centers, more publicity, a means/system of transporting the products, etc. Prototyping the ideas with the most potential, this could include running ads on TV, radio, and social media apps, and connecting the farmers to agro-industries via the app. We want the initial prototypes to be low cost/resolution while eliciting useful feedback from the users. Testing can be carried out by giving the different prototypes to the farmers and users and letting them experience it themselves, to analyze their responses. This is useful in comparison and the whole process is often iterated in no particular order to narrow down the scope.
References
Design thinking Process png source: uxdesign.cc
