Design Thinking

To help you understand how the Design Thinking Approach works, we shed light on the 5-stagemodel of Design Thinking that the Hasso-Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford proposed.Introduced by the leading university in teaching the principles of Design Thinking, these 5phases are a sure-fire way to solve problems. The 5 stages of Design Thinking are:

1. Empathize​ – Do research on the needs of your users.
2. Definition of the problem​ – State the issues and needs of your users.
3. Ideate​ – Challenge suppositions and formulate ideas.
4. Prototype ​– Start creating solutions.
5. Test ​– Test your solutions.

Understanding these 5 critical stages will indefinitely empower anybody to apply design thinking methods in solving complicated problems occurring around us in our firms, countries, and the entire planet.​

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1. Empathize

In the initial stage of the Design Thinking approach, it is essential to understand the problem you are attempting to solve with empathy. This includes consulting professionals to get an in-depth insight regarding the areas of concern. Observing, empathizing, and communicating with people can help you better understand their motivations and experiences.

It also permits you to immerse yourself in a realistic environment around you and gain a profound understanding of all the issues. Empathy plays a vital role in a human-centric design process like Design Thinking. This way, design thinkers can get more insight into user needs rather than make worldly assumptions of their own. Based on time limitations, a significant amount of data is collected in the first stage. This horde of information will be used in the nextstep in developing a detailed understanding of your users, their requirements, and the underlying issues of a specific product.

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2. Define

The second phase is all about defining the problem. In this step, you will need to accumulate and piece together all the bits of information you have collected in the former Empathizing stage.This is where you will examine the observations and combine them in an orderly fashion to define the principal problems that your team has acknowledged as of now.

Note that you need to determine the issues in a human-focused style. The right way to quote the definition of the problem would be to generalize it rather than portraying it as a personal wish ora need of the organization.

The "Define the Problem" stage will help the designers in your company muster up some great ideas in establishing functions, features, and other essential elements. These will assist them in problem-solving, or at a bare minimum, enable users to effortlessly solve problems independently. The Define stage prepares you to move forward to the 3rd phase, i.e., Ideate.Here, you can question yourself regarding things that will eventually help you in seeking ideas for solutions.

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3. Ideate

In the 3rd stage of ​Design Thinking Methodology​, your team of designers is prepared to generate ideas. By this point, you are familiar with your users, understand their needs, have examined and combined your observations, and derived a human-focused problem statement.

With a solid background like this, you and your team can begin to think innovatively in identifying novel solutions to the problem statement you have defined earlier. This is the step in which you will seek alternative ways of understanding and observing the stated problem.

There are dozens of ideation methods that can be used for this process. Some of these Ideation methods offer sessions that are used for expanding problem space and inspiring free thinking.

The more problem solutions and ideas you can derive at the commencement of this phase, the more likely you will solve the problem statement. By the end of the Ideate phase, you should choose various other ideation techniques to assist you in investigating and experimenting with your ideas. This way, you can come across the best method to resolve a problem or offer the constituents needed to evade it.

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4. Prototype

Your design team will now manufacture a specified number of cheap and scaled-down editions of the product offering or specific features that define the product. This enables them to examine the problem solutions that were created in the third stage.

You can share and test the product type on anyone, such as your own team, in other departments, or on a tiny gathering of people outside your design team. A prototype is an experimental rung, so the primary aim is to find the best and most feasible solutions for all the identified problems.

The solutions are applied within these prototypes and are examined one by one. These solutions will either be accepted, disapproved, or enhanced and re-investigated based on users' overall experience.

At the end of the prototype stage, your design team will develop an improved idea of the product's constraints and the existing problems. It also gives you a clear picture of your users' thoughts and feelings about your prototype and how they will behave and interact with the final product.

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5. Test

In the last and final stage, evaluators and designers will test the whole product rigorously by implementing the previous phase's best solutions. Since Design Thinking is a repetitive process, the testing phase results will frequently be used to redefine additional problems and notify users' understanding, conditions of usage, how people feel, behave, think, and empathize.

Even though testing is the final phase of this 5-stage model, it will often undergo rigorous tests.Even during this stage, the design team will be making refinements and modifications to rule out the irrelevant problem solutions and derive a profound understanding of the product and its end-users.

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