Design Thinking Process
What is the design thinking process?
As part of the design thinking & life series I would like to start with describing what design thinking process is. The process here is based on my own understanding out of my experience and study on design thinking process. The design thinking process can be seen through 3 groups of act where each groups has steps that overlaps other groups this is possible when you are trapped in limbo when you have enough data to proceed but not enough to solidify your next step. The design thinking process is a holistic approach, meaning that each steps has to be able to work with the other steps where immediate roll-back from one steps to the other is possible.
The design thinking process, according to the 2016 IDEO slide is different than linear business process. Where in the business process we’re encourage to converge our inspirations into smaller groups, the design thinking process encourage us to diverge and converge as needed. The wave on the chart represents when we’re encouraged to have the most ideas and when we need to kill some of it to move on with the process.
Inspiration
In the inspiration stage, we start by empathising with the person we’re designing for (designee). Empathising means to observe, engage and immerse ourself with the designee by empathising we’ll find underlying needs of the designee. Once we got the informations needed we can move to the next process of defining the problem space. Defining the problem I think is the most difficult part of the design process, a particular issues can be framed through multiple angle even though the wanted result is clear the way we look into the problem defines how we are going to work on the problem.
Creation
Once we managed to define a problem statement; what causes the problem, for whom the cause of the problem affects, and how to affect the cause of the problem. We can start to see what we want to create to affect the cause of the problem. Not necessarily eliminates or reduces the cause as that might not be what we want to achieve from the solution. And we should focus more on the cause rather than the problem itself. (I’ll talk more about it in a later post)
Then we reach ideation, the process is much more enjoyable from now on. This is the stage where we are encourage to throw as many crazy ideas as possible to saturate ourselves with solutions, forget quality go for quantity as it is very common for sub-par ideas to turn into something really good for the problem being, once someone told me “the best idea is the simplest one that people don’t think of” so don’t shy away from saturating your idea board with weird ideas as long as it still focuses on the problem. After you got your ideas do not spend too much time to dabble in perfecting the idea, pick one idea to test with the whole assumption of those idea and start prototyping.
Implementation
Start prototyping as soon as possible, as a matter of fact I would encourage you to spend 60% of your time and effort on the implementation stage. Do not overthink your assumption, we will never have enough data and we will never have the perfect solution. But a tangible solution would allow us to understand so much more, quoting the most quoted statement on prototyping “If a picture worth a thousand words, a prototype worth a thousand pictures”.
Your prototype should be tested and evaluated testing a prototype is as simple as giving it to your user for them to use while you watch them struggle with it, but evaluation is the most important key of testing. Make a list of things you want to evaluate, make a dozen of fringe scenario on how your prototype could go wrong in a weird situation and deliberately try to put your user in that weird situation just to see how user would behave. A winning prototype is the one that can give you your basic evaluation points answered and offers you a bunch of other findings on your ideas.
That’s not all
All of those above is just a generic view on the design thinking process, and mind you this might not be the best definition of the design thinking process but this is one that I discover through the time. Let me know in the comment if you have any inputs or questions after all learning is also an iterative process. On the next post I’m going to talk about each process in a more detailed manner using daily life decisions I encountered for the case study.
