Design Thinking (Micro Read)

What is Design Thinking?

According to (What is Design Thinking and Why Is It So Popular? 2020), Design thinking is a human centric approach to solve complex problems in a creative and innovative manner. It is a rigorous process which involves challenging the status quo to understand users point of views and gain unknown insights. This involves approaching the problems in a unique way to formulate effective strategies and solutions users will love. 

Design thinking is a systematic approach to empathise with the users while questioning different sets of assumptions and implications. It is an effective process driven methodology to study the interests of the target users to build great products and services. 

Design thinking is a very popular process used and taught by ample of prominent organisations across the globe including the likes of Google, Apple, etc. This process can be certainly deployed to organisations of different scales and sectors. Thus, the scope of implementation of this process at all scales of organisations is quite hands-on and highly advisable to significantly improve the understanding of the client's needs. 

Phases of Design Thinking:

The process of design thinking can vary based on the operations of the various organisations. However, the principles remain quite similar and universal. The most widely recognised phases are explained in brief as below;

Empathise:

This phase is the initiation step to understand the user’s views. It requires innovators to understand what influences the users based on their experiences and perceptions. It is essential to remove biases towards any opinion the innovators might have. The right way to conduct this phase successfully is to ask the right questions and get into the shoes of a user.

Define:

Once the innovators have identified different sets of challenges and their preferences, it is now time to clearly articulate the triggering problem. This requires to carefully examine the findings from the previous phase. It would also be quite insightful to look into how the user is currently solving those problems and might as well be worth it to look into the weightage of different problems. 

Ideate:

The innovators brainstorm on craziest ideas possible to design relatively better solutions as compared to the current solutions to tackle the user’s challenges. There are no limitations on the number of ideas the innovators can come up with. In fact, it would be a good idea to have as many as possible. The most important rule for brainstorming is that the innovators aren’t allowed to criticise each other in order to protect their creativity. Another tool like voting is utilised to further shortlist and select the ideas. The factors considered while selecting the ideas are user’s desirability, technical viability, and business feasibility.

Prototype:

This phase of the design thinking process involves building a minimum viable product with a lean mindset in order to fail faster and smaller. This typically consists of developing a tangible outcome either digitally or physically. However, it should not be a fully-functioning product and should leave ample room for improvements. 

Test:

In this phase, the key performance indicators need to be identified thoroughly for the purpose of testing the features of the prototype. This phase would allow the innovators to fairly improve the features and eliminate the unnecessary elements of the prototype.