Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation; it’s a way to use empathy and a hands-on process to understand users and what they really need, and solve problems in a more innovative way.
It’s a methodology that iteratively builds solutions through the process – a paradigm and a set of principles. In addition to ‘design’, this approach also encompasses creativity and innovation, since they cannot be defined without mentioning one another.
Design thinking requires that we understand users through experience, and that we redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternate solutions that might be more innovative and effective. It emphasizes action, tangibility, and iterative improvement.
For simplicity’s sake, the ‘design thinking’ process can be broken down into five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test.
Please note that in this guide we will cover each stage in detail providing insights and practical tips.
1. Empathize: Research Your Users' Needs
Empathise phase, refers to an intense desire to get a good bead on the users for whom you are designing; to put yourself in their shoes; to look at the world through their eyes; and to understand their experiences, needs and challenges. The goal, as far as this step of design thinking is concerned, is to generate as much qualitative data as possible to feed into the rest of the process.
Steps to empathize
As your first step, interact with your users. This can be done through interviews, surveys, observation, or immersion. For this step, it helps to dig deep: discover as much as you can about users’ specific behaviours, motivations, and pain points.
Draw Empathy Maps
An empathy map is a tool that helps to synthesize user research into a clear needs picture. Typically there are sections such as ‘Says’, ‘Thinks’, ‘Does’ and ‘Feels’ filled in based on users’ needs and feelings in different contexts.
Observe and Listen
Watch users in the wild. How are they engaging with your good or service? What tasks are they trying to complete? Be attentive and listen closely to those being interviewed in order to uncover additional insights.
Collect Data
Use qualitative data from user interviews, ethnographic research and surveys to help better understand users’ needs and behaviours.
Why Empathize Matters
Empathy is important because you want to understand your users and describe their problems in their terms, not yours. If you are close to the users you are designing for, you will avoid solving the wrong problems or the right problems in the wrong way. You’ll be grounding your design in their real needs, not just assumptions.
If you don’t empathize, you’ll miss new opportunities because you don’t really know what the person is trying to achieve in the first place.
2. Define: State Your Users' Needs and Problems
Once the Empathize stage creates enough insights, the next step in the design-thinking process is to Define the problem. The Define stage allows you to synthesize the information so it can be articulated in the form of a clear problem statement. In the Define stage, the hope is to transform all of this unfocused information into a narrowly targeted problem.
Analyze and Synthesize
Look at what was uncovered in the Empathize stage, and abstract from it what are the recurring patterns or themes? What are the biggest needs of the users?
Write User Personas
Based on your research, write user personas — that is, fictitious characters that represent different types of a user, along with their needs, goals, and behaviors. This helps put the user in the center of our design process.
Develop Problem Statements
Develop a problem statement that details the particular human challenge you are trying to understand and address. A strongly articulated problem statement should be human-centered, actionable, and narrowly focused.
Define Success Criteria
What will success look like for your design solution? That is, what measurable can you point to that demonstrates you meet the needs of your users and the goals of your project? These criteria should be the conclusions from your Research phase above.
Why Define Matters
Defining the problem also sets the course of the project since the right definition will guide the ideation, making sure that the solutions you conceive are sound and can make the impact you intend. Your audience will know exactly what to expect. Moreover, it opens the doors to new solutions and provides a common focus for teams that can otherwise be distracted if they lack direction.
3. Ideate: Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
Coming up with good ideas only half of the equation needed to succeed. To make sure that it works as intended, it is vital that the right resources are allocated. Resources mean financial investment, time, human resources and technology and here’s how to manage them. So that’s where ideation process comes in (4 Tips To Elevate Your Ideation Sessions).
Use Idea Management Platform (Idea Management Software)
Brainstorming technique can be used to quickly generate an abundance of ideas. Encourage people to think without judgment during idea generation to facilitate the free association that can lead to invention. Leveraging idea management software for gamification, mind mapping, sketching and brain writing can also be used to stimulate ideation (11 Effective Ideation Techniques With Examples).
Assumption-Busting
Encourage the team to examine long-established assumptions with fresh eyes and identify unusual approaches to what can sometimes seem like impossible problems.
Encourage Divergent Thinking
Ask team members to come up with far-fetched ideas – crazy, outrageous, far-fetched and downright stupid suggestions – so that you can create a long list of options before moving to selecting which is feasible.
Why Ideation Matters
The design thinking here centres on ideation since, in its infancy, it requires an openness to a multitude of potential solutions. To spark ideation, the design thinking challenge should be framed to include explicit assumptions about the problem. Prompting the design thinker to challenge these assumptions will help to broaden the range of potential solutions.
4. Prototype: Start to Create Solutions
Prototyping is an exercise in shaping ideas into objects: you have an idea, and you turn it into a tangible thing to see how it might work, allowing you to literally put things together. Prototypes can be rough sketches or crude models, or more formal mockups or even full-blown working versions of a product.
Low Fidelity Prototypes
You begin with low-fidelity prototypes: paper sketches, wireframes, simple, quick, cheap to construct. These prototypes must be easy to iterate on too: change them quickly to try out ideas.
Repeat Iteration and Refinement
Feed what you learn back into your prototypes by having users and stakeholders provide feedback, and then iterating (quickly repeating the attempt) so that you make adjustments and refine the prototype again and again until it’s good enough.
Build Many Versions
Avoid having just one idea, and don’t limit how many prototypes you build in search of the best idea. This will help you see the best features and those that need to be discarded.
Test Functionality
Does the prototype properly tackle the core problem and work as intended? Is it usable and does it provide an excellent experience to users? Is the solution technically feasible?
Why Prototype Matters
Prototyping breeds life into your design thinking process and ensures that all ideas get an equal opportunity, and most importantly that the solutions practicable for your team. When you iterate prototypes frequently and early in your design thinking process you’ll get feedback on your solutions and as a result, when you finally launch your product, it’ll be shaped by the people it was designed for.
5. Test: Try Your Solutions Out
The fifth and final stage of design thinking is Testing, in which you prove your solution works with real users. Here, you get feedback, learn from users and, based on what you learn, refine your solution so that it meets user needs. It’s an iterative process. It often ends up cycling back to one or more of the earlier stages.
Perform User Testing
Test your solution with users (prototype, usability test, A/B test, etc) and see how well it meets the user’s needs.
Solicit Feedback
Get user feedback during and after you test it. Watch their faces, hear their disgruntled sighs, and listen to their suggestions on how to fix it.
Interpret Results
Look for trends in the feedback and testing data, then analyse where your solution succeeds and where it loses traction. Use this analysis to make choices about what to change in the design.
Revise the Solution
Based upon the learning that emerged through testing, a designer might make changes to the prototype they’re exploring. Depending upon the learning, they could return to the farther ago ‘ideation’ stage to individually create a diversity of solutions.
Check the Final Product
After the solution has been polished, conduct a final set of tests to verify that it meets the assumptions and criteria used to define the problem, and that the problem has now been solved.
Why Test Matters
Testing is so important in design thinking because, well, that’s when you get to find out if it works! By testing on users, you get real-world feedback: ‘Yes, here’s something that solves my problem. And it brings value.’ By bringing users into the testing phase, you ensure that what you build really solves their problem, and that it matters to them. In theory, badly thought-through ideas won’t make it through the testing phase.
Conclusion
The design-thinking process offers a useful framework that helps to solve these wicked issues. By working through each of the five stages of the process, Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test, you can build an understanding about who you are designing for and what you are designing (Empathise), clarify the essence of the problem (the challenge) and distill the problem into human and actionable terms (Define), brainstorm novel ideas that appear crazy or off-beat at first but have value (Ideate), quickly produce prototypes of these ideas, and give them a whirl to see how they behave in actual use (Prototype). This entails rigorous feedback loops (Test), using failure as an opportunity to ‘assess and reassess’ the feedback and come up with new and improved ideas (Prototype).
Design thinking is not linear: rather, it is an iterative cycle, which you can constantly return to, and create new versions of your model as you learn in and out of each step. Moving through the different cycles, you will most likely return to previous steps in the process, informed by your own new insights (or those that crop up along the way). This, presumably, is why design thinking works so well in so many different industries.
To put it simply, design thinking can help you develop solutions that are not only innovative, but also highly fitting to the real needs of your users. Whether your goal is to create a new product, a service or an experience, design thinking offers a highly structured – yet adaptable – way to get there.
The need to innovate and adapt to a dynamic and rapidly changing world is more acute now than it ever was. Design thinking helps teams thrive in uncertainty, by challenging assumptions and delivering solutions that can make a difference to real users. When you are working on your next idea, remember how the creative power of design thinking can make it innovative and valuable to you and your users.
