The Design Thinking Process

The design thinking process is a design methodology that helos in solving complex problems by taking a human-centric approach. Human-centric design puts user needs, desires and abilities at the center of the development process. It means making design decisions based on how people can, need and want to perform tasks, rather than expecting users to adjust and accommodate their behaviors to the product. The design thinking process has five stages: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Understanding your customer is key to creating success. However, you can’t just listen to what they say, you need to go deeper and empathize with your customer. In order to do so, it is important to research your user’s needs thoroughly and extensively. This will help you gain insight into what exactly the user is looking for in a design.

During the define stage, you will put together the information you have created and gathered during the empathize stage. You will state the user’s needs and problems. This is where you will analyze your findings and synthesize them in order to define the core problems. You should look to define the problem as a problem statement in a human-centered manner and create user personas that portray your findings.

During the ideate stage, you are challenging assumptions and creating ideas. In generating ideas it is important to brainstorm and think outside of the box. You will then begin create solutions during the prototype stage. You are producing inexpensive versions of the product, such as paper prototypes, and then developing them into wireframes.

The last stage in the design thinking methodology is testing. In this stage you will try out your solutions and see what ideas work and what needs to be worked on. Design thinking is an iterative process. The results from this stage can also be used to redefine the problem causing you to go back a few stages before testing again.