Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test. The overall goal is to identify alternative strategies and solutions that are not instantly apparent with your initial level of understanding.
Design thinking is more than just a process; it opens up an entirely new way to think, and it offers a collection of hands-on methods to help you apply this new mindset.
Design thinking is an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases:
- Empathize: The first stage of the design thinking process focuses on user-centric research. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathize with your users.Empathy is crucial to problem solving and a human-centered design process as it allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into users and their needs.
- Define: In the Define stage, you will organize the information you have gathered during the Empathize stage.Defining the problem and problem statement must be done in a human-centered manner.
- Ideate: During the third stage of the design thinking process, designers are ready to generate ideas.With this solid background, you and your team members can start to look at the problem from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement.
- Prototype: The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments or on a small group of people outside the design team.
- Test: Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype stage. This is the final stage of the five-stage model; however, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or more further problems. This increased level of understanding may help you investigate the conditions of use and how people think, behave and feel towards the product, and even lead you to loop back to a previous stage in the design thinking process. The ultimate goal is to get as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.
