Design Thinking 101
No matter what you do in life, it is likely that you have come across the concept of Design Thinking and have instinctively applied it in your daily activities. So, what exactly is Design thinking and how can you implement it? This article provides insights into Design thinking from the perspective of UX Design.
In simple terms, Design thinking is an approach to problem-solving and innovation. It is a mindset and a methodology that helps businesses and organizations address challenges, develop practical solutions, and improve customer experiences overall.
The core principles of Design thinking are as follows:
-Human-centered: because you must privilege who you designing for or you completely missing the point and your work goes unnoticed and criticized.
-Collaborative: it’s an exercise of cross-communicating and exchanging ideas with your team/partners.
-Iterative: as it continuously improved and adapted to real-world insight.
Design Thinking typically involves several key stages which are often represented as a cyclical process:
Empathise: this is where you connect with your users on an emotional level about your product/ features. User research is crucial at this stage because it helps you identify the root of the problem. Tips that could guide you at this step are asking lots of questions and being open-minded about user answers, being more of a listener, and being observant.
Define: based on the information gathered from the research and empathize phase, state the problem you’re trying to solve, which is a description of the users' needs that your design will address.
Ideate: this is where the collaborative aspect of Design Thinking comes into play. Engage in brainstorming sessions with your team to generate a wide range of solutions and decide on a design approach.
Prototype: Once a set of potential solutions has been generated and approved by the board, you create low-fidelity prototypes or simulations of those solutions. These prototypes can be physical or digital, depending on the nature of the problem. The goal is to continue to refine the prototype as you gain insight into whether the design for your product or service is easy to use and solves the users' problem.
Test: test your prototypes with actual users to gather feedback and evaluate their effectiveness. Testing can involve observations, surveys, and usability testing. From then, you can implement your solutions and use the insights gained from testing to help refine and improve the designs.
Design thinking encourages a user-centric approach, focusing on understanding and solving users’ problems rather than making assumptions about their needs. It promotes collaboration involving stakeholders from different backgrounds in the design process.
Always remember to use the feedback from testing to make refinements and iterate on your designs.
Read more on Design Thinking: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/design-thinking
PS: I hope you found this post helpful and intuitive on the application of Design Thinking.
I would like to know how you go about yours in your projects.
If you’ve got questions, I’ll be happy to provide more clarity. Thank you!
