Design Thinking: More than a Strategy! It’s a Mindset…

Have you ever heard about “Change is the only Constant”? What do you do to keep up with the ever-evolving changes in your users’ needs and demands?  

You may continuously innovate your products/services to survive in the market and meet your customer expectations. But sometimes, you might struggle and fail to keep up with the market changes. 

Imagine being in a world where every problem has its unique and creative solution that satisfies the needs of your users. It feels great, right? 

You can do that by following an approach called Design Thinking. Simply put, Design Thinking is a user-centric approach that focuses on users’ pain points to solve their problems while infusing creativity and logic. 

Successful businesses implement Design Thinking to improve their workflow and end outputs (products/services/procedures/experiences). 

The most successful — and recognizable — brands use Design Thinking. IBM, Google, Airbnb, PepsiCo, and Nike are just a few of the wildly successful brands that consider Design Thinking as a core part of their culture and way of doing business. (Source: Experience Point)

What is Design Thinking? 

The famous statement “Customers are the king” rightly applies to Design Thinking. This approach is all about keeping users at the heart of your offerings.  

You can think of it as a kind of problem-solving methodology where you need to consider your users’ needs above anything else to provide better products, services, procedures or experiences.  

Design Thinking is centered around constantly modifying your products until they fit in your customers’ expectations.  

This approach encompasses 5 stages including Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. 

Let’s further explore these stages in detail and see how they work in the design thinking process.  

5 Stages of Design Thinking 

Let’s look at all five stages of design thinking and what you will do in every stage: 

Stage 1: Empathize 

In the first stage, you need to understand the needs and requirements of your customers for whom you are developing a product, service, experience, or procedure. Understanding the pain point of the end user becomes the most important factor.  

For that, you can use multiple research methods to get your customers’ recommendations or suggestions. Some popular methods include surveys, interviews, questionaries, empathy mapping, and so on. 

After this research, you will have ample data to identify the problem that your users are facing, and you can work on how you can resolve it in the next stage.  

Stage 2: Define 

In the second stage, once you have got the insights about your users or customers, you can define the problem statement or challenge depending on your users’ needs or pain points. 

This stage involves understanding your research findings to identify the core problem that you need to address. Once done, you can ideate different solutions to the problem in the next stage.  

Stage 3: Ideate 

In this stage, you can generate an array of solutions to the problem defined in the second stage. You need to brainstorm different ideas with multiple possibilities and perspectives to come up with an innovative solution to address the problem.  

You can use multiple ideation techniques for this process like brainstorming, Brainwrite, Worst Possible Idea, SCAMPER, etc.  

Stage 4: Prototype 

In the prototype stage, you create prototype of your ideas to test and refine it. The prototypes can be in multiple forms like sketches, models, digital renders, etc. These prototypes should be able to convey the product idea that will be developed into the full-fledged solution in the final stage. 

Stage 5: Test 

In the testing stage, you can collect feedback from your users by testing your prototypes in real time. With this, you can identify how users are interacting with the prototypes. Next, you can get feedback on usability and use this information to adjust your prototypes and make improvements, as required. 

We will learn about some more examples while going forward. We will also explore real stories of success, showcasing how design thinking makes a big difference in business.   

Next Read: Empathy to Execution: A Practical Journey through Design Thinking Stages

Retro Read: Design Thinking