The design thinking process explained

The design thinking process can help you find creative, user-centered solutions to complex problems. But how exactly does it work? In this article, we explain what the design thinking process is and break down the five phases on which it is based. 

What is the design thinking process and why is it important?

The design thinking process was first mentioned in Herbert A. Simon's book The Sciences of the Artificial. As a cognitive scientist, Simon studied the decision-making process that people go through.

Simon's ideas contributed significantly to today's model of the design thinking process and offered companies a different approach to understanding their users.

The design thinking process focuses on examining users' needs and finding solutions to develop better products and services for them.

This process encourages innovative thinking and creative problem solving that leads to better businesses and non-profit organizations.

The five phases of the design thinking process are:

• Empathize
• Define
• Develop ideas
• Create prototype
• Testing

Let's take a closer look at this process and how it works in a real company.

Empathy

Imagine a person, let's call her Laura, who is starting to learn programming. She may be bouncing from one free online resource to the next, struggling to find a structured path. Although she gets a job as a developer after her learning journey, the process of coding has been a lonely and frustrating one for her.

After talking to many other self-taught developers, she realized she wasn't the only one with this story. So Laura began researching and learning more about those who were embarking on the self-taught path.

So Laura begins to empathize with others who are struggling to learn coding and tries to understand their needs, desires and goals. During her extensive research, she comes across a central problem.

Define

Laura founds an online learning platform for programming with the aim of tackling an important problem: the lack of access to quality education for most people around the world who want to learn.

If you want to learn programming, you usually go to university or a bootcamp. However, Laura is aware that access to both of these options is problematic.

University is a wonderful way for students to learn and get an education, but not everyone has the means or the time to complete a 3-4 year degree.

Bootcamps are an alternative to gain the skills needed to enter the workforce. However, through extensive research, Laura has found that most bootcamps are very expensive and are usually attended by people who already have a college degree.

So she asks herself, "What about everyone else?"

What if someone wants to learn programming, but there is no quality, structured resource that is also free?

Develop ideas

Laura sets the goals and mission for her organization to tackle the problem she has defined. The world needs a coding bootcamp that helps everyone else. That means:

• It should be fully online so that busy people with families and people from all countries can participate.
• It should be inclusive and not "selective" and open to all, regardless of age, gender, race, country of origin or language skills.
• There is only one sure way to overcome socio-economic barriers: participation should be 100% free.

So Laura set about creating an online platform that offered a free, structured learning environment that could be completed in a browser and was completely self-paced.

This meant that anyone around the world could learn for free on any device without having to worry about downloading a whole bunch of software.

The idea is to create an online platform with dozens of interactive challenges and projects that users can create and add to their portfolio.

It also wants to create an online chat and forum for developers to share their experiences and help each other. This will address the core problem that many self-taught developers have when trying to learn programming in isolation.

Prototype

Laura creates a first prototype of her platform within a few days and starts to promote it on social media. This early version includes some challenges for users and a chat room where learners can interact online.

The prototype phase is important because it leads into the final phase of the design thinking process: User Testing.

Testing

In the first few months, the first participants took part in the platform and completed the challenges.

Because Laura's project is open source, people can provide feedback and make changes to the first version of the curriculum.

During this initial phase, Laura and her small team can identify usability issues and observe how users interact with the platform. From there, they can listen to the feedback and start implementing the changes.

Conclusion

The design thinking process focuses on exploring users' needs and finding solutions to develop better products and services for them.

This process encourages innovative thinking and creative problem solving that leads to better businesses and non-profit organizations.  

The five phases of the Design Thinking process are:

• Empathize
• Define
• Develop ideas
• Create a prototype
• Testing