Design Thinking, Not Just Another Buzzword
Design-thinking is one of those phrases that’s used a lot, everyone you ask will provide a different opinion over its precise definition.
Definition
Centres around the concept that design isn’t a solitary, isolated discipline. Design-thinking brings together many different elements of an overall process (design approach) by adopting a multi-disciplinary approach to engineering a solution, it involves massive collaboration and frequent iterations. But some consider design thinking a methodology, while others consider it a philosophy. The one thing that everyone tends to agree with, however, is that design thinking is a systematic approach to solving problems and creating new opportunities.
The Origins of Design Thinking
“Design thinking is created because big corporation lack the ability to be creative and on extreme cases, aren’t able to create new products and services that meet unmet needs of their customers. Because of 20th century education system that fostered dominant logic and disregard creativity,… “
The Design Thinking Process is sold as a one-size-fits-all solution. In actuality, it’s a tool for teaching problem solving that’s effective in educational.
Approach
I normally break it in 2 parts, first part is the Ideology side of it approach to innovation and applying methods from creative process, Design Thinking is based on several mindsets such as: Have a vision of the future, Seek inspiration, Acknowledge uncertainty, Learn by doing, Think with your hands, Go visual, Fail often, fail early, fail cheaply.
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The second part is the Process Design Thinking more systematic side of things, a step-by-step framework to guide you through the problem.
The end goal of the process is to create a product, or experience that people want, has real potential to become useful, and can easily or conveniently be built in terms of technology.
I will break it down in 6 phases as a guide to follow you through the process, it can be apply on small organization or large, so it scales and we can shape it with our own needs.
This diagram is often presented with the caveat that you can do the steps in roughly any order, and often need to iterate through many of the phases multiple times. It is a fantastic teaching tool, and helps simplify design down to its essence so beginners can learn.
Phase one: Empathize
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, Conduct research to develop an understanding of your users.
Get to know your users how they feel, talk to them, the Design Thinking process recommends quality over quantity in general. This means fewer people in your interviews, but selecting people that you think can represent different audiences of your product or service, that is really valuable.
Interviews aren’t the only way to gain empathy
During the Empathy Phase, you can use some powerful tools, such as Empathy Maps, where you can list what personas say + do (explicit) and think + feel (implicit).
Empathy mapping helps to consider how other people are thinking and feeling. Typically, research notes are categorized based on what the research interviewees were thinking, feeling, doing, seeing, and hearing as they engaged with your product.
Resources about Empathy maps:
Phase two: Define
Now it’s time to revisit the initial design challenge and re-define the problem. user + need + insight
Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. In pinpointing your users’ needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.
Redefining and focusing your question based on your insights from the empathy stage.
Phase three: Ideate
Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas.
In my opinion, ideation is the best part of the process because it’s fun and exciting. :)
Once a problem/opportunity has been clearly defined, start looking for ways to solve it. Generating as many ideas as possible we ideate. Design thinking highlights that during this stage we should not reject ideas because they seem too simple or too basic. Any idea can be a seed for another. So pay close attention and examine every new idea with a fresh perspective.
Make sure you separating idea generation from idea evaluation, the evaluation happens later — during prototype and testing spaces.
To ideate is to be messy, to reject the often hierarchical structure of linear problem solving. To ideate is to embrace an approach that allows multiple voices and ideas to compete, percolate and evolve.
Design thinking also promotes a team approach to brainstorming, and especially embraces multi-disciplinary teams, which could bring together different point of views. This always gives better results.
Spend the time listening to your team mate feedback.
To finalize this stage, narrow down all the ideas leaving only the best ones, for the next phase.
Resources:
Phase Four: Prototype
“A prototype is worth a thousand meetings”, is a saying at IDEO.
The most basic definition of prototype is, “A simulation or sample version of a final product, which is used for testing prior to launch.” The goal of a prototype is to test products (and product ideas) before sinking lots of time and money into the final product.
A prototype is an amazing tool to help you fail fast to learn fast. It’s a lot cheaper to fail early (during the initial stages of a project) than later, after lots of resources are allocated and working on executing tasks.
There are different techniques for that such as ‘sketching’, ‘rapid prototyping’, etc. No matter which technique you prefer, the essence of this step stays the same: here we are building rough drafts of solutions to determine whether or not our solutions actually apply to the problem. And, as suggested by design thinking, we should do it in a simple, fast and least-expensive fashion.
Depending on the context, a prototype can later evolve into a ‘beta product’ or a ‘minimal viable product (MVP)’.
Prototype meaning and resources:
Phase Five: Test
The name of this stage says it all. When at this stage, test the prototype with the users in order to receive the feedback and solutions, to learn more about the user, and to test and refine. Also synthesize whether or not our solution meets their needs.
When testing, let users play with your prototypes, watch and listen. If small tweaks are easy to make, do them and test again. Get close to your users and most importantly, never fall in love with your ideas have an open mind and listen the users.
Some resources about testing:
In Conclusion
Design Thinking is a method or process that starts with a design challenge, moves to the empathy phase (interviews, observation or experience), then to definition (or re-definition) of a problem or challenge, embraces ideation (diverge first and converge later), uses prototypes (build to think and learn fast) and continues with testing.
Design Thinking can be regarded as a problem solving method or, by some definitions, a process for the resolution of problems.
As a solution-based approach to solving problems, Design Thinking is particularly useful for addressing so-called “wicked” problems. Wicked means that they are ill-defined or tricky.
Resources:
An Introduction to Design Thinking PROCESS GUIDE
Thank you for reading, if you have anything to add please send a response or add a note!
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