The design thinking method is a constant process that involves gaining a better understanding of your user, challenging assumptions, redefining assumptions, and developing novel solutions that can be illustrated and tested. The general idea is to find alternate techniques and answers that are not immediately obvious based on your current level of expertise. As a result, design thinking offers a solution-based approach to problem-solving that enables you to do it creatively and collaboratively.
There are the stages of the design thinking process, and they are explained as follows:
Empathize
- Gaining an empathetic is the first stage in the design thinking approach, which is also understanding the problem you are trying to solve.
- This also means speaking with specialists to learn more about the issue at hand, observing, engaging, and empathizing with people to better understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment to gain a more personal understanding of the issues available.
- In a human-centered approach like design thinking, empathy is key since it helps designers put their worldviews aside to understand their customers and their requirements.
- Depending on time constraints, a large amount of data is collected in the following location to establish the most excellent possible understanding of the consumers, their demands, and the difficulties underpinning that specific product’s development.
Define the issue
- Throughout the define step, you combined the knowledge you gained and acquired during the empathize step.
- There is where you will synthesize and analyze your observations to describe the fundamental challenges you and your team have noticed.
- In a human-centered way, you should try to define the problem as a problem statement.
- The Define stage will assist your team’s designers in generating outstanding ideas for features, functionalities, and other aspects that will allow them to solve problems or, at the very least, allow users to resolve difficulties with the least amount of trouble.
Ideate
- During the third step of a design thinking process, designers are ready to produce concepts.
- You learned more about your users and their needs in the Empathise stage, then you evaluated and consolidated your findings in the Define stage.
- With this strong foundation, you and your team may begin to “think outside the box” to uncover new solutions to the issue statement you’ve written and alternate perspectives on the problem. Brainstorm, Brainwriting, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER are just a few of the hundreds of Ideation techniques available.
- Brainstorming and Worst-Case-Idea sessions are commonly used to encourage free-thinking and broaden the issue area.
- It’s critical to start the Ideation phase with as many ideas or issue solutions as feasible.
- You should have picked several other Ideation techniques by the end of the Ideation phase to aid you in investigating and testing your ideas to determine the best way to either fix an issue or offer the pieces necessary to circumvent it.
Illustration
- The design team will now make some low-cost, scaled-down duplicates of the product or certain pieces to test the issue solutions developed in the previous stage.
- Illustrations can be shared and tested inside the design team, in other departments, or with a few non-design team members.
- This is an experimental phase whose goal is to find the best solution for each of the challenges highlighted in the previous three stages.
- The answers are implemented in the prototypes one by one, and based on the users’ experiences, they are either approved, enhanced, re-examined, or rejected
- The design team will better know the situation at the end of this stage of the product’s restrictions and issues and a better understanding of how real users will behave, think, and feel while engaging with the final product.
Test
- Designers or assessors put the entire product to the test by utilizing the best solutions found during the illustration process.
- The information gathered during the testing phase is usually used to redefine one or more issues and educate the understanding of the users, the circumstances of usage, and how people think, behave, feel, and empathize in an iterative process.
- Changes and improvements are made during this stage to rule out potential issue solutions and get a thorough grasp of the product and its users.
Therefore, Design thinking is more than a method; it’s an ultimately new way of thinking that comes with practical tools to help you put it into practice.
