If you’re a designer, an entrepreneur, or any kind of employee, there is constant pressure to innovate. It’s the secret sauce, after all; the key to progress and success. Our capacity for innovation—the ability to conceive ideas that are at once actionable and effective—is what gives us the upper hand in competitive industries.
PermalinkWhat is design thinking?
The design thinking process outlines a series of steps that bring this ideology to life—starting with building empathy for the user, right through to coming up with ideas and turning them into prototypes.
Design thinking is extremely user-centric, which is great news for designers trying to keep the users at the heart of the product development process! This framework aims for practical and logical innovation, with a solution-based view of things: focus on potential solutions, and on what can be done to solve the problem.
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.
Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
PermalinkDesign Thinking: A 5-stage Process
Empathize—Research Your Users' Needs
The first step isn’t to look at the market, the features your product will have or anything related to the product itself. The first thing you want to do is to focus on the user. The goal of this stage is to understand the user’s needs, wants and hates.
Some companies reach out to experts in human behavior while other, smaller companies, simply settle for observing and trying to see things from the POV of the user.
You can achieve this by engaging with users – you can hold interviews, but try to make them casual and resemble more a conversation than a formal interview.
A very important note regarding this stage in the design thinking process is that the designer needs to resist the temptation to form assumptions regarding users.
Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems
It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have identified.
These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.
When framing your problem statement, you’ll focus on the user’s needs rather than those of the business. A good problem statement is human-centered, broad enough for creativity, yet specific enough to provide guidance and direction.
Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
With a clear problem statement in mind, you’ll now aim to come up with as many ideas and potential solutions as possible.
The ideation phase gets you thinking outside the box and exploring new angles. By focusing on the quantity of ideas rather than quality, you’re more likely to free your mind and stumble upon innovation!
At the end of this stage, you’ll have a short list of ideas you can pursue. These ideas will evolve to become your prototypes and, hopefully, your final product! Once you know which ideas you want to pursue, start developing each one until the divide between them becomes clearer – you don’t have to decide on one idea straight away.
Prototype—Start to Create Solutions
Having narrowed your ideas down to a select few, you’ll now turn them into prototypes—or “scaled-down” versions of the product or concept you want to test.
The prototyping stage gives you something tangible that can be tested on real users. This is crucial in maintaining a user-centric approach.
Depending on what you’re testing, prototypes can take various forms—from basic paper models to interactive, digital prototypes. When creating your prototypes, have a clear goal in mind; know exactly what you want your prototype to represent and therefore test it.
Test—Try Your Solutions Out
As you would expect from a model that has been around for a long time, the design thinking process varies according to industry, sector or just plain preference. Sometimes, you’ll find that testing is added to the prototyping stage.
The Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford had some great advice for designers: 'prototype as if you know you’re right, test as if you knew you were wrong'.
Testing your prototype isn’t just about telling users to do tasks or asking yes or no questions. It requires planning and some level of expertise if you hope to get reliable feedback from users.
The testing phase enables you to see where your prototype works well and where it needs improvement. Based on user feedback, you can make changes and improvements before you spend time and money developing and/or implementing your solution.
PermalinkConclusion
The design thinking process is like a map designers can refer to when they need direction in their creativity.
It shouldn’t be seen as a step-by-step guide as that would imply a straight line, with a specific order in which tasks need to be carried out.
The design thinking process isn’t linear at all, which gives designers free rein to expand on their ideas, gather information, validate said ideas and see it all in action.