- Design thinking is an iterative process
focused on understanding the user and the user's problem.
The goal of design thinking
is to identify strategies and solutions
that might not be instantly apparent
with our initial level of understanding of customer needs.
Design thinking is based on a deep interest
in understanding customers.
It is focused on questioning and validating the problem,
the assumptions and the solutions.
It is very useful when defining and validating a problem
that is not well understood or is simply unknown.
In this case, we adopt a hands on approach
to test and prototype it.
Design thinking involves ongoing experimentation,
brainstorming, and that all includes prototyping,
sketching, testing, different ways of validating ideas.
Design thinking is usually implemented in phases.
It starts from understanding customer needs
to developing and testing solutions.
Pioneers of design thinking include the company IDEO
and Stanford's d.school.
Those companies use their own definition of the process.
What is important?
The process is never linear.
It's repeated iteratively.
For example, d.school defines
the following five phases of design thinking,
empathize with your users,
define your user's needs, their problems,
and your insights,
ideate by challenging assumption
and creating ideas for innovative solutions,
prototype to start creating solutions,
and then test them.
Very simple five steps
and very powerful in understanding
the actual customer needs.