What Is The Process of Design Thinking

When talking about catchwords in business, one label that attracts several eyes is Creative. Of course, every company in the market intends to win the tag of war between creativity and innovation. After all, that’s the only way to survive in this cut-throat competitive world, isn’t it? Somehow, amidst all of the creativity and innovation, what got its root spread across is the design thinking process.

So, to delve more into the concept of creativity, it’s important to understand the dynamic phenomenon of design thinking as it can prototype-centered and user-oriented innovative process. With this process hitting the roof in the startup industry, it’s high time to learn more about its approaches and stages.

But, first, let’s understand what this concept is all about.

What is Design Thinking?

Being a solution focused and problem-solving methodology, design thinking helps individuals and companies alike to achieve the desired result by planning for future or resolving current internal issues. With design thinking, users can curate a structured plan to comprehend innovation and to develop the company more.

When it comes to tackling difficult problems that are entirely unknown or ill-defined, this concept turns out to be useful. It helps you understand the needs of your customers by reframing their issues in a human-centric way, by creating ideas during brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a practical approach for prototyping and testing.

Understanding the stages of this process can empower you to implement these methods to solve complex problems that may occur in your business.

Conventional Approaches to Design Thinking

Whether you’re thinking to use this approach with eCommerce web-design or any other purpose, you must be wary of certain common mindsets and methods that completely regulate the process of this methodology.

1. Foresight:

When you’re working upon new ideas, it’s recommended to neglect being stuck with previous work. Depending on how you imagine the future, try to innovate and come up with something creative. Let that vision create a way for your thinking.

2. Getting Inspiration:

Visit the kind of place that’s conducive for learning and designing. By being surrounded by inspirational things, you can easily use the stimulating power to create new ideas.

3. Be Ready for Uncertainty:

It’s quite apparent that you cannot know everything in the beginning itself. You must understand that even if the design thinking process goes in a flow, it’ll be harmless. Eventually, as you become familiar with the responses of users to your products or services, you’ll be able to find better answers.

4. Be Practical:

Nothing will make you more perfect than experiments and executions. Thus, it’s time to learn and implement. Whenever you’re stuck with an idea, make sure you aren’t overlooking it. Be practical and execute your plans. Once done, assess the results and start tweaking accordingly.

5. Visual Effect:

With visual encouragements, communicating the information will become much more comfortable. Once you’ve got the precise definition of your ideas, establishing and connecting them with users won’t be a huge deal anymore.

The Process of Design Thinking

Now that you’ve got the basics of design thinking, it’s time to understand the core difference between the design thinking process and the generic innovation process. The latter one comprises four different stages, such as ideate, define, design and develop. These stages should be synced effectively to establish the level of innovation in a company.

On the other hand, there are five stages of design thinking, viz. empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. One of the best things about this process is that you wouldn’t have to follow any stringent order to churn out results.

Instead, design thinking embraces the multi-dimensionality of a vigorous process, and you get the freedom to juggle across stages to comply with your workflow. With this process, you can gain more ideas and choices.

In comparison with the linear innovation process, design thinking is a converging and diverging proves. So, let’s dive deeper and know more about the different stages of design thinking.

1. Empathize:

The first and foremost stage of this process is to obtain an empathic understanding of the problem that you wish to solve. Being the central focus, it comprises consulting experts to discover more about the concerning area through observing, engaging, and empathizing with customers.

Empathizing highlights the importance of hearing the wants and requirements of your customers in regards to a specific problem. This approach can help you investing time over discovering the issues and then finding solutions for them.

2. Define:

In this stage, you get to combine those insights that you had obtained at the time of hearing and observing your customers. Here, you begin defining a problem and recognizing the challenges that lay ahead for you.

To illustrate it in the simple form, it’s recommended not to make it about you or your brand. However, just talk about your customers, their requirements, and how they can be benefitted from what you’re offering. This stage helps you framing problems clearly so that you can devise solutions and explore more opportunities. Try and frame the issues correctly so as to get more answers.

3. Ideate:

Now that you’ve clearly understood the requirements of your customers, found out the problems and framed the opportunities, this stage allows you to search for those methods that can handle your discoveries. Whether you ideate or brainstorm, in this phase, spur over as many ideas as possible. Even if the ideas seem obvious or easy, you must not ignore them at any cost.

After all, any idea can help you create a brilliant concept. Hence, make sure you’re approaching every idea with a new perspective. When this juncture reaches the finale, shortlist the best ideas and leave the rest aside.

4. Prototype:

Prototyping is a phenomenon that incorporates solutions into visions. In this stage, there is a variety of methods that are involved, like rapid prototyping, sketching, and many more. Irrespective of the process that you choose, the fundamental purpose of this stage always remains the same. And that would be creating rough drafts of solutions to conclude if they’ll be beneficial to solve a problem or not.

Experts recommend following a speedy and straightforward approach when prototyping. Depending on the context, you can also transform a prototype into a minimal viable or a beta product. By the end of this stage, you and your designing team will have a better idea of restrictions and the problems that are present in your way. Not just that, but you’d also have a clear view of how your users are going to respond to the end product.

5. Test:

Just as the name suggests, this is the last stage that is dedicated to testing and nothing else. Here, you and your team get to test the prototypes framed in the previous steps, with potential customers to assess their response and figure out whether the solutions satisfied them or not.

Even during this stage, you’d have to make alterations, tweaks, and refinements to derive a deeper understanding of the product.

Wrapping Up

So, that was all about the design thinking process. To sum everything up, design thinking is a prove, rational, and intricate approach to designing a new product that provides you thoughts so as to come up with a framework for the better growth of the business.

Of course, the entire process cannot be accomplished overnight. So, make sure you’re patient in your holistic approach and establish every step carefully so as to come up with the best results.

About the Author!

Rohit is a Digital Marketer by profession and a travel enthusiast by passion. He loves to stay updated with latest upcoming technology. Professionally he works with Wpeka to come up with Digital Marketing strategies to help them deliver the best WordPress Products.