Stages of Design thinking: What should design think of creating in 2023

Product innovation occurs at the crossroads of attractiveness, commercial viability, and technological feasibility. Design thinking incorporates all three and provides commercial value. It has a proven ROI. Thus, Businesses that see the value of incorporating "design thinking" into their processes are making billions.

Design thinking, which business leaders once dismissed, has now emerged as a significant driving force in the business world, thanks to mentions in the Harvard Business Review (Kolko, 2015) and Forbes (Modicum, 2017). This Buzzword that is now popularized is "a human-centered approach to innovation that pulls from the designer's toolkit to incorporate customer’s wants, technological possibilities, and corporate success requirements."

This rising trend is currently altering core corporate processes. It is changing how businesses think and how design and product teams work. Some have even accepted the value of user experience and, as a result, have invested in improving customer experience! This can be considered a major change since most businesses did not know what user experience meant ten years ago.

What Exactly is Design Thinking??

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving approach that is widely recognized as a good path to human-centered product innovation. It has been referred to as a methodology, a culture, and a philosophy. Fundamentally, design thinking realizes that design should achieve purpose and business goals, not merely beauty.

This concept arose from large organizations' inability to be creative and develop new products and services that meet their customers' unmet demands. This encourages thinking beyond the box, with a strong emphasis on creativity, innovation, and user demands. Thus, it provides a problem-solving approach centered on solutions. Unlike problem-based thinking, which focuses on hurdles and restrictions, the design thinking method is entirely focused on outcomes. It gives a non-linear sequence of steps to help you generate new, actionable ideas!

“The application of design techniques, design methods, and design frames of mind, not for the production of new artifacts or objects, but to the application of developing new models of business value, potentially new business themselves […] from the design of things to the design of ideas.”

Charlie Cannon, Chief Design Officer at Epic Decade –?

What are the stages of the Design Thinking process??

Design thinking is a critical tool for simplifying and humanizing processes. It is important to note that the stages of Design Thinking are not linear. Despite the fact that the process is frequently described in terms of sequential phases, it is essentially a highly iterative cycle. Corporations make new discoveries with each step, which may need revisiting earlier ones. Let’s take a look at the five stages of design thinking:

1.Empathize: Researching the users’ needs?

User-centric research is the emphasis of the initial stage of the design thinking process. To build desired products and services, it is vital to first understand the business's users and what they require. What are their expectations for the product you are creating? What are their issues and pain points in this context?

During the empathize phase, the company can spend time observing and engaging with real users (or persons representing the target group) - conducting interviews, observing how they interact with an existing product, and paying close attention to facial expressions and body language.

2.Define: Stating the Users’ needs and problems?

The knowledge obtained during the Empathize stage must be organized during the Define phase. This will aid in assessing the observations and defining the fundamental problems that the company and team have found.?

Once the necessary information has been compiled, the company can create a problem statement. A problem statement, also known as a point of view (POV) statement, describes the issue or challenge that you want to address. The problem statement, like everything else in the Design Thinking process, keeps the user in mind. Thereby, the company will have a clear problem description by the end of the define phase, which will guide the design process. This will serve as the foundation for the company’s ideas and potential solutions.

3.Ideate: Challenging assumptions and creating ideas

Designers are ready to develop ideas during the third stage of the design thinking process. In the Empathize stage, businesses grew to understand their users and their demands, and in the Define stage, they examined their observations to generate a user-centric problem statement. With this firm foundation, the company may begin to examine the problem from several angles and generate new solutions to its problem statement.

There are numerous ideation tools available, including Brainstorm, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER. Brainstorming and Worst Possible Idea approaches are commonly employed at the beginning of the ideation stage to inspire free thinking and broaden the problem space. This helps in developing as many ideas as possible at the beginning of the brainstorming process.

4.Prototype: Creating Solutions for the better future?

In the fourth step of the Design Thinking process, the companies can prototype their ideas from stage three. A prototype is a scaled-down version of a product or feature, whether it is a basic paper model or a more dynamic digital depiction.

The prototyping stage's goal is to transform the company ideas into something practical that can be tested on real users. This is critical in maintaining a user-centric approach since it allows the company to gather feedback before developing the entire product. This guarantees that the final design answers the user's problem while still being enjoyable to use!

5.Test: Experimenting with the solutions?

Designers or evaluators extensively test the entire product utilizing the finest solutions discovered during the Prototype stage. This is the fifth and last stage of the five-stage model; however, in an iterative process like design thinking, the outcomes are frequently utilized to redefine one or more additional challenges. This higher level of understanding may assist the organization in investigating the circumstances of use and how people think, behave, and feel about the product, and may even lead you to a previous stage in the design thinking process.

Creating new solutions with Design Thinking in 2023

Every work of art or piece of the material requires critical thought to deliver its message appropriately. Similarly, software designs require design thinking in order to propose novel solutions to client problems. Thus, design thinking has emerged as a commercial trend. The rationale for this is that it reduces the uncertainties and dangers associated with innovation. It becomes easy to comprehend how to give value to customers as it involves prototyping to test and enhance concepts. It develops insights through real-world experiments, assisting businesses in developing a market-leading strategy.

As a result, design thinking will be used in a variety of sectors in 2023 to accomplish improved problem-solving and creative product design. Information Technology (IT), Healthcare, Business, Education Sector, UX, design, Value engineering, Public Institutions, Social Organizations, Visual thinking, Graphic Design, Digital Design, Automotive Manufacturing, Advertising, and E-learning are among these sectors.

Conclusion

It is vital to understand that design thinking is a methodology that helps a company produce quality while also solving challenging technological problems. This method is easy to implement because it is a five-step process. Organizations that are not already adopting design thinking can quickly transition to it. The best feature is that it stimulates team participation, which is an important component of the design process.