Monday, April 29, 2024

Solve Problems Using the Design Thinking Process 2024

design thinking steps

Please reach out to us at We’d be happy to connect you with one of our expert alumni. This stage allows for all details to be flushed out and refined to create the best solution possible. As you explore the empathy data, focus on identifying patterns and problems across a diverse group of people. Gathering information on how people are currently attempting to solve the problem and how they explore alternative solutions can provide clues into their underlying root problems.

design thinking steps

Stage 5: Test—Try the Solutions Out

Design Thinking is characterized by its collaborative and iterative nature, emphasizing creativity, empathy, and experimentation. It encourages a bias towards action and a willingness to embrace ambiguity and failure as part of the innovation process. By focusing on understanding user needs and rapidly iterating through prototyping and testing, Design Thinking enables teams to develop solutions that are more effective, user-centered, and impactful.

Step 2: Decide what is the main problem that you are actually solving – be focused

The team then thinks about solutions to satisfy these needs from the end user’s point of view. The design team will now produce a number of inexpensive, scaled down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the key solutions generated in the ideation phase. These prototypes can be shared and tested within the team itself, in other departments or on a small group of people outside the design team. Design Thinking tools help teams combine perspectives and shape ideas. Each tool supports specific steps of the design thinking process, and comes in several flavors. The following section introduces the most popular Design Thinking tools, with additional links to more detailed resources.

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Instead of hypothesizing about what your users want, design thinking encourages you to get out there and engage with them face-to-face. Rather than talking about potential solutions, you’ll turn them into tangible prototypes and test them in real-world contexts. Here you’ll try out the solutions you arrived at in the previous phases by user testing them. However, while this is the final stage of design thinking in theory, it’s rarely the final stage in reality. Design thinking often includes going back to previous phases to find other solutions or to further iterate or refine your existing solution.

Core Design Thinking Research Activities

You can also use a number of tools and techniques to generate hundreds of ideas stimulated by the questions you created in step two. You can generate ideas in a number of ways, both individually, in pairs (even with a customer), and as a team (or even a group of users) with solid rules for brainstorming to help you generate more and better ideas. After testing different prototypes out with teasers, your team should have different solutions for how your product can be improved. The testing and prototyping phase is an iterative process—so much so that it’s possible that some design projects never end.

Case Study 2: GE Healthcare’s Scanning Tools

design thinking steps

The first stage of the design thinking process is to look at the problem you’re trying to solve in an empathetic manner. To get an accurate representation of how the problem affects people, actively look for people who encountered this problem previously. Asking them how they would have liked to have the issue resolved is a good place to start, especially because of the human-centric nature of the design thinking process. We live in an era of experiences, be they services or products, and we’ve come to have high expectations for these experiences. They are becoming more complex in nature as information and technology continues to evolve. While design thinking is simply an approach to problem solving, it increases the probability of success and breakthrough innovation.

Design Thinking provides transparent prioritization tools to help teams identify and apply the most effective criteria. It’s important for teams to challenge their Statement of Opportunity several times throughout the Design Thinking process. Or should it be updated to reflect new insights about users or feasibility? Validating the statement during Define keeps everyone on the same page.

What is the Design Thinking process?

The Design Thinking process helps teams use work through “wicked” problems and turn opportunities into innovations. When teams apply the Design Thinking process, they work through a series of steps and activities toward a solution that is desirable, feasible and viable — also known as the Three Lenses of Human-Centered Design. As you may have guessed by now, design thinking goes way beyond just the way something looks. And incorporating design thinking into your business is more than just creating a design studio and hiring designers.

Wicked problems demand teams to think outside the box, take action immediately, and constantly iterate—all hallmarks of design thinking. The mission of the MIT Sloan School of Management is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice. It is also important to interview and understand other stakeholders, like people selling the product, or those who are supporting the users throughout the product life cycle.

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With each iteration, solutions become more attuned, innovative, and user-centric. The first stage of the design process is to develop  a deep understanding of the target audience/customer/consumer and their unique perspective to identify and address the problem at hand. To do this, design thinkers are encouraged to cast aside all assumptions (because assumptions can stifle innovation!) about the problem, the consumers, and the world at large.

When someone says that something can’t be done or wouldn’t work, the rest of the team should ask, “Why not? ” This can lead to more ideas and cause participants to challenge their own assumptions about how a design “should” be done. Stanford’s D.School has come up with a POV MadLib for defining a design problem and refining it to a single point of view. This can be incredibly helpful for design teams that are having trouble distilling user needs in relation to the problem they’re trying to solve. On occasion it goes beyond simply defining the problem—sometimes reframing it can lead to better solutions.

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Jakob Nielsen says “a wonderful interface solving the wrong problem will fail." Design thinking unfetters creative energies and focuses them on the right problem. This is the most important part of design thinking, but it is the one most often forgotten. As Don Norman preaches, “we need more design doing.” Design thinking does not free you from the actual design doing. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users. Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. While pinpointing your users’ needs, begin to highlight opportunities for innovation.

You can expect additional iterations and modifications to the solution that entail returning to a previous stage. Continue refining until you find a successful solution and implement it. Mural helps teams visualize their ideas in a collaboration platform that unlocks teamwork. This helps everyone stay on the same page, while giving them the ability to add their own ideas freely and easily. Mural facilitates effective collaboration both in person and remotely, making it ideal for design thinking workshops for co-located and distributed teams.

In the define phase, use the data gathered in the empathize phase to glean insights. Organize all your observations and draw parallels across your users’ current experiences. Testing is incredibly valuable because without it, designers can’t collect user feedback. And user feedback is what allows products to really solve the problems they were designed to solve.

Next, you’ll focus on developing ideas quickly turned into prototypes and tested on real users. Inherent to the Design Thinking process is the early and frequent testing of your solutions; this way, you can gather feedback and make any necessary changes long before the product is developed. Design thinking is an iterative, non-linear process which focuses on a collaboration between designers and users.

In the “Ideate” phase, the team synthesizes the insights gained to brainstorm a wide array of creative solutions. This stage encourages divergent thinking, where teams focus on quantity and variety of ideas over immediate practicality. The goal is to explore as many possibilities as possible without constraints.

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