5 Steps On How To Implement Design Thinking in your businesses today

The Internet of Things

May 10, 2021

Step 1: Empathize with users

This step is crucial in the design thinking process. It means seeing the world of your customers, appreciating their human side, grasping their feelings and delivering a clear understanding at the end. Studying your customers’ behaviors, feelings and thoughts helps you gain insights into what your customers need in a real-life setting.

Step 2: Define

Right after studying the users behavior, needs and motivations, then it is time to develop a deep understanding of the real challenge to focus on. Hence observation is key to identify the issue. This stage is where you should establish features and functions to help overcome the challenges. Ask the right questions and generate different ideas which leads to the 3rd step ‘Ideate’.

Step 3: Ideate

By asking the right question for the right users, you will come to the ideation stage with the right answers. In this stage the main goal is to find solutions and study a problem from different perspectives. The ideation process can go from:

Braindump
Brainwrite
Brainwalk
Challenge Assumptions
Scamper
Mindmap
Sketch or Sketch Storm

All these methods can help you bring the best innovative ideas to discuss and test for your users.

Step 4: Prototype

This is where you design and produce the solutions generated in the ideation phase. then you start experimenting and implementing all your designed ideas to bring them to life. The aim is to find the most suitable solution for the identified problem. Your prototypes will be either accepted or rejected depending on the users’ experiences. Prototyping is all about re-examining and improving. When presenting your end product, it is important to pay attention to the users in terms of behavior, thoughts and interactions with it.

Step 5: Test

The final phase is testing which leads to the iterative process. The results generated from your testable prototype are used to redefine additional problems and communicate what is ideal for users to broaden your understanding of their experience. Then observe again how they feel, how they behave, and think, i.e to empathize and define to gain the most informative insights.

All in all, once adopting this approach, you should always keep in mind who we are designing for? What is the problem we are trying to solve? empathise with people, understand the problem, gather information, understand the end users’ needs and then create personas. To a final stage of ‘Test and Learn’ approach to generate new ideas.