Design Thinking- A way of making decisions for solving a real-world problem
Design thinking is not limited to a process. It’s an endlessly expanding investigation.” — Sandy Speicher
What is Design Thinking?
Design Thinking is a design methodology or we say a process that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It encourages organizations to focus on the people they’re creating for, which leads to better products, services, and internal processes.
Why Is Design Thinking so Important?
In User Experience (UX) and User Interface(UI) design, it’s crucial to develop and refine skills to understand and address rapid changes in users’ environments and behaviors. Of all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better UI/UX research, prototyping, and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.
Ways — Design thinking can help you and your team:
· Better understand the unmet needs of the people you’re creating for (customers, clients, students, users, etc…).
· Reduce the risk associated with launching new ideas, products, and services.
· Generate solutions that are revolutionary, not just incremental.
· Learn and iterate faster.
· With design thinking, teams have the freedom to generate ground-breaking solutions.
Phases of Design Thinking
There are mainly five phases/stages in Design Thinking.
· The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Gather Inspiration from all over about your problem and inspire new thinking by discovering what people really need.
· During the second stage — the Define stage, you put together the information you have created and gathered during the Empathise stage i.e. first 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.
· During the third stage of the Design Thinking process — the Ideate stage, designers get ready to start generating ideas. For accomplishing this stage well push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas.
· Coming to the fourth stage of Prototype, at this stage make ideas tangible. Build rough prototypes to learn how to make ideas better. Through this stage solutions gathered at the previous stage 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.
· With this, we reach the final stage of testing and launching. At this stage Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified during the prototyping phase. We Test to learn and refine ideas by gathering feedback and experimenting forward. At last Craft a human story to inspire others toward action towards your product.
Ways to Get Started:
Now you know what design thinking is and how it can be applied to almost any context. So why not start now?
1. Gather Insights by Practicing Empathy, Observation, and Interviewing.
2. Build Scrappy Prototypes to Learn About Unmet Needs.
3. Turn Problems into Questions.
4. Use Research to Understand the Past, Present, and Future.
Hence, Coming up with an idea is easy but coming up with the right one takes work. With design thinking, throwing out what you think you know and starting from scratch opens up all kinds of possibilities. Don’t feel little at any stage, Design thinking can also start small — you don’t need to become a UI/UX designer in order to apply design thinking to your own work!
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