The word design thinking is making a buzz everywhere of late. In our daily lives we all encounter a wide range of experiences. Sometimes the negative ones can irk us in such a way, where it forces us to find a suitable solution. Design thinking is not a new entrant in the world, as a matter of fact, it has long been practiced by stalwarts of music, literature, science, engineering and business.
Whether or not we consider ourselves a ‘designer’, we all have the ability to solve daily problems that affect others. If these solutions are implemented strategically, they can in fact improve lives.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a solution-based approach that simply aims to improve the situation of people through their experiences.
It is an iterative process in which we strive to consider the user’s encounter, so that we can focus on their human needs, contest our own assumptions, and redefine the problem at hand for the purpose of identifying myriad strategies and solutions that might not be obvious with our preliminary level of understanding.
It allows us to shift the way in which we perceive – from the concept of ‘as is’ – to the more inclusive approach of ‘to be’.
Design Thinking helps organizations and their product teams to identify and cultivate user-friendliness. Being iterative in nature, designers have been challenging the problem, assumptions and outcomes over and over before a human-centered design-driven solution is found, which is then prototyped and tested. If needed, the entire process is repeated until every stakeholder is convinced of the product’s usability and marketability.
Design thinking is People Oriented. It involves number of people from several different areas. More the number of inputs would give more perspectives for undertaking the problem at hand.
Who is a design thinker?
Anyone, who has ability to visualize the impact of their work and has concern for humans and the environment they operate in, is already a design thinker. It is a generic approach, anyone who would like to bring good user experience can use it.
Being a design thinker would mean that we are starting to think like a designer, which requires us to adopt a particular set of attitudes and flexible ways of thinking.
It would mean you are being mindful of how you can improve the current experience of the users. You see, because this process is heavily user-centred; all problem-solving efforts require us to be creative and collaborative.
How to practise design thinking
While everyone has their own understanding of design thinking and hence they have their own approach, the fact is that almost every approach is similar. When you practice Design Thinking, you consider a person’s true, unique experience, having said that the best frameworks focus on real people and their real problems or requirements.
In essence, there are 5 most pertinent steps of design thinking:
Empathize – Understand Your Users’ Needs
Design thinking focus on identifying the right strategy as everything revolves around user experience. Only by unearthing the secrets of user’s mindset we would be able to walk on this road. For this we need to understand what the user says, thinks, does and feels. This way of capturing user data is called creating empathy map.
Define – Analyze Your Users’ Needs and Problems
We need to analyze the research again and again to come up with exact problem statement. Clearer the problem statement, easier to head towards the solution. In this step prepare a list of “How can I [make it better for the user] followed by the pain-point statement. This list will give us a clear understanding of user’s biggest pain or need at the moment.
Ideate – Bring in Ideas to Solve the Problem
Once we are clear about the problem user is facing then it is easier to start fixing it . If we have no clue how to start doing this then brainstorming is the easiest and most promising way to gather a clear insight of possible solutions.
Prototype – Create the Most Suitable Solution
During prototype step we work on bringing our hypothetical solution in the real world. We start working on the most suitable and desirable idea to fix the problem statement. It would be a good idea to make low-budget and lightweight prototype in order to make it easily customizable per iteration.
Test – Verify Your Solution Against User’s Problem
The prototype is presented to people, preferably the user to get the feedback and understand whether the problem has been resolved or not. This step gives us more detailed insight of the problem statement, which might have not been discovered yet.
Now it is the time to redefine the problem and rebuild the solution. We might not redo the entire process following each of the previous step also the steps needn’t be sequential in same order. We can start at any step and go back and forth on the steps based on the results in our hands. Additionally there could be more steps if we need to make the process further systematic. For example at times we might want to evaluate the ideas before we start prototyping it.
So how do we implement this Design Thinking mindset?
Design thinking is a problem solving, iterative process. It can be embraced not only by designers but by anyone who is inclined to solve problems. A variety of models exist today that outline these basic components. This flow begins with invoking empathy and digging deeper for ways of enhancing user experience. If we want to use design thinking in our problem-solving methods then the only way is to start doing it. Whenever we are fixing a problem and if we can understand the value it adds to the real world then we are moving in the right direction. The whole idea revolves around improving user experience by discovering the minute details of the problem at the same time understanding users’ mindset about the problem.
We should always keep in mind that we are not just designing a solution or a product, we are designing a better user experience.
