And why is it so important if your business operates in a high competitive market
What is a Design Thinking?
First of all, DTh is a research tool that makes your business (more) profitable. Usually, its a non-linear, iterative process that seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. The method consists of 5 phases—Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test and is most useful when you want to tackle problems that are ill-defined or unknown.
Collaborating with humans can be messy, complicated, and often time consuming. You have to educate people as to what you’re going to be doing. They won’t always be open to being educated. You have to invite the people you don’t want to invite—the sales people, the marketing people, and the operational people. You have to invite all the people who have opinions that you don’t like to hear. You have to carefully listen to their concerns and their perspectives. You’re going to hear a lot of things you don’t like. People will say your ideas and process won’t work, but the only way to succeed is to do it anyway.
GOAL
Design thinking helps you and your team develop practical and innovative solutions for your problems.
Design thinking is a help to avoiding the pitfalls of imposing the wrong solution on a community.
Design thinking is empowering everybody to be part of the solution and make the solution better more informed.
Main phased of the Design Thinking
1. EMPATHISE - Research Your Users' Needs
Ask What-How-Why
The first stage of the design thinking process allows you to gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, typically through user research.
This is where you’ll sit with real consumers and end-users to understand their point of view. Empathy requires understanding the pain points and the day by day truth of your target audience. It additionally requires some information about learner’s motivations and needs, which probably won’t be self-evident.
Assume a beginner’s mindset
Ask the 5 whys
Conduct interviews with empathy
Build empathy with analogies
Use photo and video user-based studies
Use personal photo and video journals
Engage with extreme users
Story share-and-capture
Bodystorm
2. DEFINE - state Your Users' Needs and Problems
In the Define stage, you accumulate the information you created and gathered during the Empathise stage. You analyse your observations and synthesise them to define the core problems you and your team have identified so far. You should always seek to define the problem statement in a human-centered manner as you do this.
Empathy Map — organise by consumer thinking/feeling, what they’re experiencing and pains.
Customer Journey — organise along with how the consumer shops or interacts with the product.
Experience Map — organise around consumer doing, thinking and feeling along the timeline.
Affinity Map — organised by a common theme or pattern.
Point Of View — focusses on your insights about your users and their needs.
The phrase “How might we….” is often used to define a perception, which is a statement of the:
user + need + insight
3. IDEATE - Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas
Designers are ready to generate ideas as they reach the third stage of design thinking. The solid background of knowledge from the first two phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve created.
Ideating is about inventiveness and fun. In the ideation stage, the amount is supported. Brainstorm and Worst Possible Idea sessions are commonly used to invigorate free speculation and to grow the issue space.
Brainstorm rule is that: one conversation at a time go for a quantity encourages wild ideas to defer judgement. No blocking build on each other’s ideas be visual.
4. PROTOTYPE — Start to Create Solutions
This is an experimental phase, and the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. Design teams will produce a number of inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or specific features found within the product) to investigate the problem solutions generated in the previous stage
Two common categories of prototypes used by designers include the Concept Prototype and the Working Prototype. Prototypes can include any of the following
Models of your idea made of cardboard and scrap material
Paper mockups of apps and digital products
Storyboards of an experience
Digital mockups
Skits and simulations
Craigslist posts, Facebook, Google ads, and other public forums to solicit feedback.
5. TEST - Try Your Solutions Out
Designers or evaluators rigorously test the complete product using the best solutions identified in the Prototype phase. This is the final phase of the model but, in an iterative process such as design thinking, the results generated are often used to redefine one or further problems. Designers can then choose to return to previous stages in the process to make further iterations, alterations, and refinements to rule out alternative solutions.
The purpose of testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t and then iterate. Even during this phase, alterations and refinements are made in order to rule out problem solutions and derive as deep an understanding of the product and its users as possible.
RESULTS
After the testing, you'll have the tonnes of materials of what is working and what's not. Taking in count that the DTh is a creative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions, you'll probably have a better understanding of the user needs and goals in terms of what idea/concept/solution/feature could solve their problems successfully (or not).
Measure the outcomes from the user testings, match them with your goals and problem definition. If the outcomes are positive, feel free to break them down into epics and features, and with the help of PO and pull into the backlog. At this stage, the Price/Value diagram could help to prioritise the features. Be that as it may, you as a UX designer could only provide the understandable qualitative and quantitative outcomes to the decision-maker, who then must take an action.
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