Design Thinking process

Overview of Design Thinking

• Design thinking (DT) is a non-linear, iterative team process that understands users, challenges assumptions, redefines problems, and creates innovative solutions for prototyping and testing.
• Design thinking fosters innovation, so companies must innovate to survive and stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment.
• Cross-functional teams collaborate to understand user needs and create solutions, helping to uncover creative solutions.
• The end goal of design thinking should be desirable, feasible, and viable.

Three Lenses of Design Thinking

• Desirability focuses on meeting people's needs by understanding their dreams and behaviors through empathy in order to determine what people want or need.
• Feasibility focuses on being technologically possible, in theory, any solution is feasible if the organization has the resources and time to develop a solution.
• Viability focuses on generating profits an organization must generate revenues and profits from the solution and is essential for both commercial and non-profit organizations.
• Design reverses the traditional approach by starting with desirability before considering feasibility or viability.

Defining Design Thinking

• Design Thinking methodology focuses on understanding and addressing human needs and experiences through a creative and iterative process.
• The process involves empathizing with users, defining the problem, generating ideas, prototyping solutions, and testing iteratively, which encourages multidisciplinary collaboration.
• Design Thinking prioritizes user-centric design and continuous improvement that is widely used across industries to tackle complex challenges and create meaningful solutions.

Differentiating Design Thinking from Design

• Design Thinking is a problem-solving approach or methodology that involves understanding human needs, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing.
• Design Thinking is not limited to traditional design disciplines and is applicable across various fields to solve complex problems.
• Design refers to the process of creating solutions with specific intents and purposes, encompassing various disciplines (graphic, product, UX, and architectural design).
• Design Thinking is a methodology for problem-solving, while design is the practical creation of solutions in specific domains/disciplines.

Overview of the Design Thinking Process

• The Design Thinking process consists of several iterative stages, each stage focusing on a different aspect of problem-solving and innovation.
• Empathize: Understand the needs, thoughts, and emotions of users/stakeholders through direct observation, interviews, and immersion.
• Define: Synthesize insights from the empathize stage to define core problems/challenges and reframe the problem statement based on user needs/pain points.
• Ideate: Generate a wide range of possible solutions without judgment, encouraging creativity and divergent thinking through brainstorming and other idea generation techniques.
• Prototype: Build rough, low-fidelity representations of potential solutions using prototyping tools/materials to visualize ideas in a tangible form.
• Test: Gather feedback by testing prototypes with users/stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of solutions in addressing defined problems and iterate based on testing feedback.
• Teams iterate between these stages, continuously refining their understanding of the problem and exploring new possibilities, emphasizing empathy, collaboration, and iteration.

Empathize and Understand

• The "Empathize" stage is the initial step where designers seek to understand the needs, emotions, and perspectives of the people they are designing for.
• The user is put in the shoes of the user to gain insights into their experiences, motivations, and challenges.
• Activities during the Empathize Stage
  • Observation: observe users in their natural environment to understand their behaviours, habits, and pain points.
  • Interviews: Designers conduct interviews with users and stakeholders to explore their thoughts, feelings, and needs to the problem they are addressing.
  • Immersion: immerse themselves in the user's world to understand their context, culture, and constraints.
  • Empathy Mapping: Designers create empathy maps to visualize the information gathered about users' thoughts, feelings, actions, and aspirations.
• The primary goal of the Empathize stage is to develop empathy for the users and gain insights that will inform the rest of the Design Thinking process.
• Designers can identify meaningful problems to solve and generate innovative solutions that address real user needs by understanding the human perspective.

How Empathy Influences the Outcomes of Design Thinking

• Empathy guides the entire process and ensures that solutions are genuinely human-centered.
• User Understanding: Empathy allows designers to understand users' needs, desires, and challenges, uncovering insights to create solutions that address real-world problems.
• Problem Framing: Empathy frames the problem statement to reflect users' experiences/aspirations, defining problems accurately/comprehensively by understanding emotional/behavioral aspects.
• Ideation and Innovation: Through empathy, designers identify unmet needs and pain points, uncovering latent needs and opportunities for innovation.
• Iterative Design: Empathy guides testing/iteration to ensure designers stay engaged, refining designs to meet user needs based on continuous feedback and user insights.
• User Engagement and Adoption: Empathy leads to higher user engagement/adoption by creating products/experiences that resonate with users, fostering connections/loyalty to the brand/product.

Empathy Research Techniques

• These techniques are diverse methods used to gain insights into individuals' emotions, experiences, and perspectives.
  • Observation: Directly observe individuals in their natural environments to understand their behaviors, interactions, and challenges without interfering with their actions.
  • Interviews Conduct one-on-one or group interviews to explore thoughts, feelings, experiences, and perspectives in-depth.
  • Surveys and Questionnaires: Distribute structured surveys/questionnaires to gather quantitative data on individuals' attitudes, preferences, and experiences.
  • User Personas A semi-fictional character created to represent different customer types that use a company's products/services/ reflect a business' core customer base. Journey Mapping: Compiling a series of user actions into a timeline, fleshing it out with user thoughts/emotions to create a condensed/polished narrative.
  • Role-Playing: Engaging in role-playing exercises and developing fictional personas based on user research findings to better understand needs, motivations, and behaviors.
  • Empathy Interviews: Conduct interviews specifically on understanding triggers, and responses to certain situations or products.
  • Shadowing Spending time with users in their environments, observing their routines, understand experiences and challenges.
  • Co-creation Workshops: Collaborative workshops to foster empathy, generate insights, and ideate solutions together.
• These techniques can be used alone or in combination to inform the design of more empathetic and user-centric solutions.

Guidelines for Empathetic Research

• Open-Mindedness Being open to new ideas/perspectives allows for diverse influences/inspiration, leading to innovative solutions and experimentation.
• Active Listening: Deeply understanding the needs, desires, and challenges of the users/stakeholders during problem-solving.
• Non-Judgmental Attitude: By embodying a non-judgmental attitude in empathetic research, researchers can foster genuine connections.
• Cultural Sensitivity: Ensures that researchers approach participants' cultures, identities, and experiences by understanding and empathy.
• Flexibility: By embracing flexibility in empathy research, researchers can lead to richer insights.
• Curiosity: Researchers can foster deeper connections, uncover meaningful insights, and the lived experiences of others.
• Patience: Researchers build connections, and generate insights that contribute to positive outcomes.
• Collaboration: Harness the wisdom, to address complex health and social to create positive impact.
• Qualitative Research Methods: Allow researchers to explore nuances.

Explore the iterative Design Thinking process, a non-linear team approach that emphasizes user understanding, assumption challenges, and innovative solution creation through prototyping and testing. It promotes innovation within cross-functional teams. Focus on desirability, feasibility, and viability.