Contents:

Overview

This is a really great world-world example of design thinking in practice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee4CKIPkIik

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/74dffc63-e2a8-436e-bec0-6c20c3286cbf/design_thinking.png

Why Is Design Thinking so Important?

Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems (aka wicked problems) because they can reframe these in human-centric ways and focus on what’s most important for users. Of all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better UX research, prototyping and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.

What is Design Thinking?

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Empathize

“To create meaningful innovations, you need to know your users and care about their lives.”

In empathy work, connect with people and seek stories

In empathy work, connect with people and seek stories

Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.

Define

“Framing the right problem is the only way to create the right solution.”

Articulate the meaningful challenge

Articulate the meaningful challenge

The Define mode of the design process is all about bringing clarity and focus to the design space. It is your chance, and responsibility, as a design thinker to define the challenge you are taking on, based on what you have learned about your user and about the context. After becoming an instant-expert on the subject and gaining invaluable empathy for the person you are designing for, this stage is about making sense of the widespread information you have gathered.