Design Thinking in a nutshell
I’m sure you heard before about Design Thinking as an innovative, creative, and user-centric problem-solving process, focused on creating solutions and products by understanding customers´ needs and objectives. At a high level, that is the correct understanding of what is Design Thinking.
However, today’s post is about the process and steps by itself, so let’s talk about Design Thinking.
Five steps of Design Thinking.
- Empathize. A regular Design Thinking process defines empathy as the initial step in the process of understanding users’ needs, wants, and objectives. So far, that’s true but during the last years, most of the Design Thinking experts, consultants, and practitioners forgot the business needs. However, the main concept idea doesn’t change, but for sure if you add business needs to the empathy step and maps these with business goals with users’ behaviors and needs, you’re attending to both stakeholders at the same time, and that is the correct understanding of empathizing.
- Define. Based on the learnings you get from the previous step, is time to come up with a definition of what the needs, problems, and objectives are of the users. The outcome of the define phase should be a clear understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, and a well-defined user-centric problem statement. Again, keep in mind business users and needs, and of course, your main focus is end-users, but your client is a company doing business.
- Ideate. Now you have a clear problem statement. Is time to invest time thinking of different ways you can best solve it. During this time, you will try to come up with many creative solutions as possible, and explore different ideas which could solve the problem at hand. At the end of this step, shortlist a few of the ideas to move forward. Just remember. Don’t tie-up with the first idea that comes up to your mind, the ideation step usually takes time and as mature you’re on the Design Thinking process, you’ll get quick ideas, but again don’t push yourself for the best idea at the first try, push yourself more on quantity than quality.
- Prototype. Now that you’ve chosen a few ideas to experiment with, it’s time to turn them into testable prototypes that help you evaluate the proposed solution, highlight flaws, and understand the users’ behavior at an early stage and at a low cost. At this point, creating a prototype is more about how the idea will work and not necessarily how it looks. Keep in mind, doing a quick HiFi/LoFi prototype will not take more than a week and less than one single day. Again, take care of users’ needs to be solved by this prototype but don’t forget business needs also at the same time.
- Test. Lastly, it’s time to test your prototype with real users. The testing phase will allow you to collect deeper insights and feedback from the users you’ve empathized with within step 1 and will help you identify areas of improvement for your prototype. For sure in this step, you’ll validate your idea and with those results, you will create a backlog of improvements for future product features. Keep in mind all the feedback received will convert into user stories and archives for future product releases.
A final word
Design Thinking is not a linear process that will require you to come and go based on the insights you collect at each step and will make you rethink and evaluate your proposal to find the best solution for your users.
If you have questions or doubts about the definitions, terms, or stories I had shared. I look forward to your questions in the comments below and will respond as soon as possible.
