Design thinking in a nutshell

You may have heard of the success story of Airbnb, the startup that went from being on the edge of bankruptcy to a billion dollar company that somehow impacted the experience of traveling in the entire world, their little secret lies in “Design thinking”; being designers, the co-founders of Airbnb have simply thought as designers do, they have imagined the entire journey of their clients so that they can tackle the problem and come up with the right solutions, and it has worked!

What is design thinking?

The term became popular when it was coined by the former CEO and current executive chair of the design and consulting company IDEO, Tim Brown, but it actually dates back to the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the professor of mechanical engineering John E. Arnold was one of the first people that wrote about design thinking in 1959, followed by the Nobel prize laureate Herbert A. Simon who was the first to mention design as a way of thinking in 1969.

Design thinking can be applied to different fields such as engineering, architecture, science, and business…

How design thinkers think and what is so special about it?

The term “design thinking” can be a little bit intriguing, and you may wonder what is so special about the way designers think so that it became an innovative and creative way of solving complex problems in different fields?

Actually, it’s simple, since the function of design is always solving a problem, designers are solution-oriented, they look for innovative, aesthetic, and honest ways to make a product understandable and useful, which explains the user-centered approach of design thinking.

The literature is rich with methods for solving complex problems, each one has its strengths and you can guess that the strength of design thinking is its human-centered approach; when you consider the customer needs in every step of your problem solving process, you can come up with solutions that solve the right problem.

How does it actually work?

The ultimate goal of design thinking is to solve wicked problems in a human-centered way, but how does it actually work?

When it comes to design thinking processes, the literature is abundant; there are many design thinking models out there, but we are going to stick to the process proposed by the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, which states that the design thinking process can be broken down into the five following steps:

• Empathize: to solve any problem, you need to understand it first, and the best way to understand a problem in a human-centered approach is to put yourself in the shoes of the users, engage with them, understand their needs, motivations, and challenges. 
• Define: now that you have a clear idea about the needs and dissatisfactions of the users, you can analyze your observations to define the problem statement, which is simply the concise description of the problem.
• Ideate: here is where the fun begins, once you have the problem statement, you can start coming up with ideas that may solve the problem. Different ideation techniques that can be used such as brainstorming, brainwriting, association, negative brainstorming…etc. 
• Prototype: in this step, you bring your ideas to life, BUT in an inexpensive way. All you want is to try out the solutions generated in the phase of ideation on real users. 
• Test: hopefully this phase will be your last one, here you test the best final product that was identified in the prototyping phase

But you should always keep in mind that design thinking is a cyclical process, when you test the final product, you may want to go back and redefine some new problems that should be fixed.

To be successful in a highly competitive world, you need to consider design thinking in every aspect of your work; while you are automating your processes, developing your web and mobile apps, integrating your software…etc. and here at Wings Technologies, we are a team of design thinkers, our experts use the design thinking model to pinpoint your problems, solve them the right way, and deliver you great go-to-market solutions.