To Comprehend The Approach of Design Thinking

Most people tend to think that Design Thinking is only about design!

By Leman Beril Sunay UX Designer,Etrexio

Most people tend to think that Design Thinking is only about design. However, it is a process that people can use for anything in life including engineering, business, education, personal, and so on. It is a human-centered approach to solving complicated problems practically.

When we face a problem, Design Thinking encourages us to explore new pathways and consider the most effective solutions by removing our boundaries. This is the main logic of the process.

Let’s take a look at the 5 phases of the Design Thinking process below to make the approach more understandable.

1- EMPATHIZE

2- DEFINE

3- IDEATE

4- PROTOTYPE

5- TEST

Foremost, you should understand that these phases are non-linear. Design Thinking is a flexible process. It is crucial to assimilate this logic since your team will often repeat iteratively.

1-EMPATHIZE

This is the critical starting point of the design thinking process where you gain real insight into users and understand their needs and requests. Observing users and communicating with them effectively ensures the development of a deeper understanding.

2-DEFINE

The second phase of the process is defining the main problems in a human-centered approach. Since you have gathered information during the empathize stage, now it is time to organize them. This stage will help the team to come up with great ideas by answering questions such as “what is the hardest problem that the team has to solve? Which complications do users face?

3- IDEATE

Since your team has defined the main problems of users, it is an ideal time to come up with potential solutions. We can easily call this stage “creativity” so the team should feel free to think from many new aspects. The brain-storming method that involves the spontaneous contribution of creative ideas and solutions could be helpful in this.

4-PROTOTYPE

After the team creates many ideas, the next step will be turning them into a palpable product that involves possible solutions in the first three stages. The solutions may be approved, changed, redesigned, or rejected based on the users’ experiences. That’s why we say the prototype stage is an experimental phase. During the process, the team will have better conclusions about the behavior of real users.

5-TEST

Although the test stage seems the final stage, it doesn’t generally happen since Design Thinking is a flexible process. In the test phase, designers attentively test the product using the solutions identified in the Prototype stage. However, the test process may make you turn back to the previous stages to get a deeper perspective as possible.

These 5 stages of the Design Thinking process will help people solve real user problems and struggle against many challenges.