Design Thinking

What is design thinking?

Design thinking is the practical processes by which a problem is solved, an approach that involves understanding customer’s needs, generating solutions/ideas, prototyping and testing. It also involves learning from mistakes to provide the best solutions to the problem. In a nut shell, design thinking is the process involves in problem solving.

Design Thinking Processes

The design thinking processes is broken up into five stages which are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Testing.

1. Empathize: this involves having a thorough understanding of a user’s problems/needs, setting asides your own assumptions and gaining a real insight about that problem. This is done typically through USER REASEARCH.
2. Define: this involves stating the user’s problems/needs by gathering all the information gotten from the research during the Empathize Stage, and analyzing the observations to define the core problem. These definitions are called PROBLEM STATEMENT.
3. Ideate: this involves generating ideas and coming up with solutions to the problem statement, making sure to think outside the box and coming up with alternative ways to view the problem and innovate ideas to solve the problem. This process is also called BRAINSTORMING.
4. Prototype: This is an experimental phase and the aim of this stage is to find the best solution to the problem and create a scale-down version of the solution so as to investigate the idea that has been generated.
5. Testing: This is where the prototypes are being evaluated to discover if that particular idea best solves the problem.

Overall, this stages are different modes that contributes to the entire design process rather than sequential steps. Design thinking is iterative, often times results from the testing stage may be used to redefine one or more problems. So, one might have to return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements. The goal is to understand the problem deeply and find out an ideal solution to that problem.

What does it mean for a designer to be able to fit himself in the shoes of a user?

For a designer to be able to fit himself in the shoes of a user, the designer must have gained a deep understanding of the user’s problems/needs which is not birthed by assumptions but by the virtue of thorough research.