Design Thinking is one of the most underrated things. Not many people have heard of Design Thinking, let alone what Design Thinking entails. Design thinking is a creative problem-solving strategy prioritizing customers’ needs and requirements over everything else.
Design Thinking is a 5 step process. According to Rilke Friis Dam, those processes are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. When it comes to empathizing, you must research your user’s needs. Dam also says that you want to understand the problem you are trying to solve along with talking to experts to learn more about the area of concern and conduct observations while engaging and empathizing with your users. The next step is to define, which means you must organize the information you gathered during the empathize stage. This stage will allow give the designers ideas to begin figuring out what will help solve the problem you are faced with. The third step is to Ideate. For this step, you should now look at the problem from a different perspective and then come up with innovative solutions to your problem statement. The fourth step is to prototype and start creating solutions. This step is done by looking at the best possible solution for each problem encountered during the first three stages of this process. The fifth and final step is to Test your solutions. With the goal being to get as much of an understanding of the problem as possible, testing is a crucial step in achieving that success.
Tim Brown says that Design Thinking is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Both Tim Brown and Rikke Friis Dam give similar explanations of what Design Thinking is. Having multiple people have similar explanations of something generally means knowing what they are talking about.
Design Thinking works if you allow it to work. One reason is that it provides a structured process that helps developers avoid unproductive biases hindering innovation. To be successful, there must be a structure. While some may argue that design thinking could be too structured and linear, some people tasked with design thinking are not used to doing this type of face-to-face research and getting submerged in their perspectives. An organized structure keeps people focused on the task at hand and prohibits them from getting off-topic. Design Thinking takes a different approach than we traditionally think regarding customer research. I tend to think of it like this. Assume you are watching what someone does in 20 minutes. From a personal perspective, you may think that what the person is doing is odd such as if they tend to look down at their feet while talking, for example. However, if you put your perspective aside, you may realize that the individual is shy and that it may help them cope with talking to someone. It is important not to judge a book by its cover, just like it is important not to judge a person on a first impression. To fully understand someone, you need to imagine yourself in their shoes to understand what makes them act the way they do.
This week, I decided to do some Design Thinking of my own. I partnered with another student and asked questions about their experience at Quinnipiac. After asking some questions, I dug deeper into one of the questions and made that my main focus. The next thing I did after that was look for surprising insights that I could use to define problems and opportunities. Based on any problems or opportunities found, I created a problem statement. After the problem statement, I devised a HMW (How Might We) statement. Following the statement, I started to search for relevant examples for the problem statement and then came up with a couple of sketches and explanations. I then created a couple of concept sketches based on the HMW, lightning demos, and my ideas. Once I created my sketches, I presented them to my partner and allowed her to vote on which idea she felt best solved the problem. I followed that up by taking notes about the response to which idea best solves the problem before refining my idea based on the feedback I had received. The next step was to build a prototype from my revised concepts, and I made sure to include all the recommendations given during the previous step. The final step was to present my final prototype and receive feedback.
Immersion in user experiences provides material for deeper insights. Once you understand the customers’ needs, you can now focus on identifying solutions to fix the need. Design thinking castes the discussion as a question about what would have to happen for an idea to be achievable. By having a structure such as the one for Design Thinking, you will be able to work together and agree on what needs to happen at each state in order for this to work. When done correctly, Design Thinking will help us understand the mindsets and needs of the people we are creating for. Without Design Thinking, many issues could arise, which could have been avoided using the structure of Design Thinking.
Please take a look at my Project below.