© Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand customers’ needs, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. It is most useful to tackle problems that are complex or ill-defined.
Stage 1: Empathise – Research Your Users’ Needs
Use customer research to seek an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve. Ask questions that will help you set aside your own assumptions about the world and gain real insight into your clients and their needs. What are they seeing and hearing? What are they thinking and feeling? What are they saying and doing? Only when we fully understand the problem from the customers’ perspective can we begin to consider how to solve it.
Stage 2: Define – State Your Customers’ Needs and Problems
Collate the information you gathered during the Empathise stage. Analyse your observations and restate them to more accurately describe the specific problems you and your team have identified. These definitions are called ‘problem statements’. You can create personas (individual customer avatars to represent a specific demographic or group) to help keep your efforts human centred as you proceed to designing solutions.
Stage 3: Ideate – Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. Look for alternative ways to view the issues and identify innovative solutions to the problem statements you’ve created. For each problem, brainstorm as many ideas as you can without judgment or critique. Then work through the ideas, systematically eliminating the least feasible and refining a short list of ideas that would be the simplest and easiest to implement.
Stage 4: Prototype – Start to Create Solutions
This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem. Create some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the solution (product, service, process) to investigate and road-test the ideas you’ve generated. Start with a small sample group, test case or pilot study.
Stage 5: Test – Try Your Solutions Out
Evaluate and rigorously test your prototypes. Build, measure, learn. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule out alternative solutions.
Overall, you should understand that these stages are different modes which contribute to the entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Your goal throughout is to gain the deepest understanding of your customers and their needs and what their ideal solution/product/service would be.
More about Design Thinking: What is Design Thinking? | Interaction Design Foundation
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