Design Thinking
The Design Thinking framework is a problem-solving approach to design.
It’s a non-linear, iterative process that broadly covers the following steps.
Understand/empathise
In this first step, you’re looking to understand your customers. This means setting aside any assumptions you may have about them. You spend this time finding out what they really want and need. So you might do some market or consumer research. If you have customer data, you would analyse this. You’re gradually building up a profile of your users’ needs and wants.
Define
Next, it’s time to write a problem statement, based on your customers’ needs. This tells you what your product or service needs to solve.
Ideate
Now you know you’re trying to solve, you can start coming up with possible solutions. In this approach, the idea is to look at it from different viewpoints. Why not get together with your team to brainstorm, or use other techniques to do this? The more ideas you generate, the better. Don’t worry if you think some are not great. You can always drop them later on.
Prototype
This step is where you make one or more prototypes of your ideas. You can share and test these with others, to help you decide which ones to take further.
You’ll start to note any issues with your design, and changes you may need to make. At the end of this step, you should have a better idea of how your design will meet your users’ needs.
Test
Once you have prototypes for your solutions, it’s time to try them out. It’s important – but can be hard - to be objective here. Don’t get too attached to a particular design. Jot down what you like – and what you don’t. Get your team to test it, too. They’ll often try it out in other ways. You could also test direct with customers.
Design thinking is not linear
This is key. You won’t always move from one step to the next. You’ll be assessing what works and refining at every step, all the time.
For instance, you may come up with new ideas, while testing others. You may decide that to build a particular design, you need to go back to your users and find out more about their needs. This means you may cycle through this process many times before you reach a design that works for your users.